U.S. government moving to deport longtime legal residents with criminal convictions

Roger Simmie is no angel.

Twenty years ago, the Mountain View carpenter was convicted of resisting arrest and drug possession. Fifteen years after that, he was found guilty of battering his girlfriend. Three times, he's been convicted of drunken driving.

But it's what he didn't do that got him locked up recently in the Santa Clara County Jail. Simmie, a Scot by birth who fought in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine, never applied for U.S. citizenship.

Now he finds himself facing deportation as one of nearly 400,000 immigrants incarcerated this year by the U.S. government. A growing number of noncitizens who have been living in this country as legal permanent residents are learning that run-ins with the law, even minor ones, are translating into life-altering, one-way tickets to homelands they no longer know.

A report last spring from Human Rights Watch found that 1 out of 5 "criminal aliens" deported from 1997 to 2007 had been in the country legally. Many, like Simmie, have known America as home for decades. "I'm living in limbo," said Simmie, 61, whose friends raised thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer to fight his deportation.

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Chrysler Dealers and attorneys Donofrio and Pidgeon file lawsuit in NYC

It can now be reported the Bankruptcy case for the Chrysler Dealers who were stripped of their dealerships by the Obama Administration has indeed been filed. Donofrio and Pidgeon have filed a Rule 60 Motion to reconsider on behalf of 21 rejected Chrysler dealers. As was expected, several more dealers have joined in the suit as well. Docket number 6137 was filed today, 12/29/2009 Motion for Relief from Stay to Allow Appeal to Continue filed by Randyl Meigs on behalf of Tommy Manuel Chrysler - Jeep, Inc.. with hearing to be held on 1/21/2010 at 10:00 AM at Courtroom 523 (AJG) Responses due by 1/14/2010. The Debtor in this case is the old Chrysler.

In their briefing, Donofrio and Pidgeon assert that the Judge in the original case, the Honorable Robert J. Gonzalez, United States Bankruptcy Judge for the Federal Court, Southern District of New York, committed an unintentional fraud by miss interpreting an important witness statement. That witness was Fiat executive, Alfredo Altavilla, who stated that restructuring of the Dealer network needed to occur before the Fiat purchase of Chrysler could move forward. The Honorable Judge Gonzalez interpreted Altavilla’s answer to mean that a restructuring did not occur when indeed it did.

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http://www.examiner.com/x-7715-Portland-Civil-Rights-Examiner~y2009m12d29-Chrysler-Dealers-and-attorneys-Donofrio-and-Pidgeon-file-lawsuit-in-NYC

How Our Borders Were Opened

Part 1 of 2


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlddGUOyZ7g

Part 2 of 2


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfK6vIkTEgA

What's your opinion?

The stage is being set for a major ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on whether the U.S. judiciary actually can enforce the provisions of the Constitution.

The basic question is being raised in an appeal of a district judge's decision to dismiss a legal challenge to Barack Obama's constitutional eligibility to be president.

WND previously reported U.S. District Judge David Carter's decision to dismiss the complaint that listed several dozen plaintiffs. Gary Kreep of the United States Justice Foundation has filed a notice of appeal to the 9th Circuit in the case. Because of the unusual circumstances in which some of the plaintiffs are represented by another lawyer, attorney Orly Taitz also has filed a motion for reconsideration.

Kreep, who represents plaintiffs Wiley Drake and Markham Robinson, posed the question at the center of the case: "Whether the court may make a determination of whether the president has met the eligibility requirements for office, whether the 'natural born citizen' clause of the
United States Constitution may be enforced by the courts, whether the 'natural born citizen' clause of the U.S. Constitution is a nonpolitical question, whether the court may remove from office a president that was not elected in accordance with the U.S. Constitution."

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http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=116305

America's Secret ICE Castles

"If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008. Also present was Amnesty International's Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in the 2009 report "Jailed Without Justice" and said in an interview, "It was almost surreal being there, particularly being someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for decades in other countries. I couldn't believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren't anything wrong."

Pendergraph knew that ICE could disappear people, because he knew that in addition to the publicly listed field offices and detention sites, ICE is also confining people in 186 unlisted and unmarked subfield offices, many in suburban office parks or commercial spaces revealing no information about their ICE tenants--nary a sign, a marked car or even a US flag. (Presumably there is a flag at the Veterans Affairs Complex in Castle Point, New York, but no one would associate it with the Criminal Alien Program ICE is running out of Building 7.) Designed for confining individuals in transit, with no beds or showers, subfield offices are not subject to ICE Detention Standards. The subfield office network was mentioned in an October report by Dora Schriro, then special adviser to Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, but no locations were provided.

I obtained a partial list of the subfield offices from an ICE officer and shared it with immigrant advocates in major human and civil rights organizations, whose reactions ranged from perplexity to outrage. Andrea Black, director of Detention Watch Network (DWN), said she was aware of some of the subfield offices but not that people were held there. ICE never provided DWN a list of their locations.

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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100104/stevens