@RealSheriffJoe

A clown -- and Ronald McDonald!

The Department of Justice today took the unusual step of suing a sitting U.S. sheriff. Joe Arpaio, the infamous sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., is charged with years of systematically discriminating against Latinos and using the power of his office to retaliate against critics.

This paragraph seems as good a place as any to note that Arpaio is alleged to have retaliated against media critics Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin -- executives with the Village Voice Media chain that owns this here paper you're reading. Both were arrested in the middle of the night in 2007 by Arpaio's deputies, which in part spurred an ongoing First Amendment lawsuit.

The Feds' suit, filed today in Phoenix, calls for a federal judge to curtail the alleged anti-Latino discriminatory practices revealed in the course of a three-year Justice Department investigation of Arpaio's department. The suit comes on the heels of Arpaio's steadfast refusal to allow Justice Department monitors within his department following the Feds' claim that Maricopa County sheriffs engaged in widespread racial profiling and discrimination.

The charges come as little surprise to San Francisco district attorney and former police chief George Gascón. As police chief in Mesa, Ariz., Gascón confronted the powerful and popular sheriff. When Arpaio targeted Gascón by sending deputies into Mesa to round up illegal immigrants, Gascón countered by having 132 of his officers monitor the sweep -- leaving the blustering sheriff to appear foolish in the resultant crush of media coverage.

Today Gascón issued a statement on the federal suit:

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What better way to truly understand the effects DOMA has had on binational gay couples than to put a face to the names.

Here's the story of San Francisco couple Brian Willingham and Alfonso Garcia featured on a video by the DOMA Project, a campaign launched in 2010 to help binational gay couples fight the Defense of Marriage Act. Willingham and Garcia share their heartfelt story about how they met 10 years ago, how they got married, and how Alfonso was shipped off to an detention center in Arizona and is now awaiting deportation to Mexico.

Watch and learn:
 
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The U.S. Immigration and Custom's Enforcement agency has taken much criticism for its "Secure Communities" initiative, where participating local police departments give immigration officials access to the fingerprints of people brought into its jails.More >>

The feds decided the food at El Balazo seemed a little too authentic

The Mexican food competition in this city is fierce. There are great burrito joints and margarita offerings in every direction. Perhaps Marino and Nicole Sandoval, owners of the El Balazo chain, were just wanting a little boost when they stiffed the feds on taxes and hired undocumented immigrants for their business.More >>

Courtesy of ICE

Making Arizona proud ...

​Immigration authorities have arrested more than 3,100 convicted illegal immigrants and fugitives, including 200 in Northern California, during a massive, high-profile sweep nationwide over the last week.

Some 1,900 ICE officers and agents throughout the United States conducted the largest six-day sting operation in history, arresting 2,834 immigrants who had prior convictions and at least 1,063 who had multiple convictions. Of those, 1,477 had felony convictions, including murder, rape, kidnapping, drug trafficking, and child abuse, according to ICE. About 50 of those arrested were identified as gang members, and 149 were convicted sex offenders.

Half of those who were arrested in Northern California had previous convictions for serious or violent crimes. And guess which counties accounted for the highest number of arrests?

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Cindy Chang

​Cindy Chang was driving from San Jose to Phoenix for a friend's wedding early this month when she was stopped at an immigration checkpoint in Eloy, Ariz. These structures are common this close to the border. More >>

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer seems to forget who is president and who is not

​California has the largest number of illegal immigrants and undocumented laborers in the country. So it should be no surprise that California Attorney General Kamala Harris has joined the fight against Arizona's unfriendly immigration law.

Yesterday, Harris filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court, joining 10 other AGs -- including those from New York, Massachusetts, and Hawaii -- who claim that it's up to the feds, not the states, to identify persons with questionable status and decide whether they should be removed from the country.

Arizona claims SB 1070, the unpopular state law that allows police to check the status of residents without probably cause, only exists to help the feds boot illegal aliens. Yet Harris reminds the Southwest state that only the feds have the jurisdiction and authority to remove immigrants from the country.

According to the amicus brief:

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​Binh Thai Luc, the man accused of brutally murdering an entire family last Friday, was reportedly ordered by a judge to leave the country six years ago and return to his native Vietnam after serving prison time for robbery and assault.

But federal authorities told the Associated Press that Luc, 35, managed to dodge deportation because the Vietnamese government never provided the documents needed to process his removal from the U.S.

U.S. law says that all aliens facing a deportation order can't be held for more than 180 days. After that, if they can't be removed from the country within the reasonably foreseeable future, ICE has to release them, Gillian Christensen, ICE's deputy press secretary told the AP.

And that's exactly what happened to Luc, who is now facing five counts of murder charges.

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​A new study by researchers at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs upends a lot of the conventional thinking about the effects of U.S. immigration policy -- most notably the contention that harsher security measures along the U.S.-Mexico border have kept immigrants out of southwestern American states.

As California Watch reports, the study by Douglas Massey and Karen Pren reveals that fewer illegal border-crossers were caught last year than at any other time in decades. Legal entries into the country across the southern border have also declined, going from 219,000 in 2002 to 139,000 in 2010.

But the impregnability of the border appears to have had another effect that anti-immigration activists wouldn't be too happy about. The study's authors found that the dismantling of a guest-worker program, as part of national immigration-law reforms in 1965, has led to fewer of the immigrants who come to the U.S. ever returning to Mexico.

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​At this point we've come to expect that Wells Fargo will screw over middle-class Americans. But it seems in the spirit of being inclusive, the big bank is now screwing over immigrants, too!

At least that's what a group of H-1B visa workers are claiming in a suit filed this week in San Francisco. Lead plaintiff Vinay Karamsetty, a web developer, says that Wells Fargo owes him $42,415 plus interest after Wells Fargo embarked on an "unfair scheme" to help dig the financial institution out an economic hole.

Karamsetty, who was hired by Wells Fargo in 2007, is accusing the bank of violating the Employee Retirement Income Security Act by denying "employee benefits under an employee benefit plan regulated and governed by ERISA." He also says that the bank promised to give their visa workers a severance payment if they were "displaced" for "business reasons."

According to the complaint:
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