Arizona state senator fires back at Cardinal Mahony over immigration bill

Russell Pearce, who wrote the controversial immigrant crackdown bill, lashes out at the L.A. cardinal, calling him a protector of child molesters. Mahony condemned the bill on his blog this week.

By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times

April 21, 2010

Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce, who crafted a bill that would require immigrants to carry proof of legal status, lashed out at Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony on Wednesday for his criticism of the proposed legislation, calling the Roman Catholic leader a "guy who's been protecting child molesters and predators all of his life."

"He's the last guy that ought to be speaking out," Pearce said on the Michael Smerconish Program, a nationally syndicated radio talk show that airs locally on KFWB-AM 980. "This guy has a history of protecting and moving predators around in order to avoid detection by the law. He has no room to talk."

Pearce's bill, which has yet to be signed by Gov. Jan Brewer, has created a national firestorm as both opponents and supporters bill it as the nation's toughest law against illegal immigrants. The bill would make it a crime to be in the state illegally and would require law enforcement officers to check the legal status of those they suspect are undocumented. The legislation would also bar people from soliciting work or hiring workers under certain circumstances, a provision aimed at the day-labor trade.

Pearce's remarks about Mahony drew an equally feisty retort from the cardinal's spokesman, Tod M. Tamberg.

"Mudslinging and fearmongering are the essence of Senator Pearce's remarks," Tamberg wrote in an e-mail. "He desperately wants to change the subject, throwing up a wall of inaccurate statements about Cardinal Mahony because he has no good answer to the cardinal's challenge that this is a draconian and unjust law."

Mahony, who heads the nation's largest Roman Catholic archdiocese with 4.3 million members, lambasted Pearce's bill on his blog this week, likening it to "German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques" that compelled people to turn each other in.

"The Arizona legislature just passed the country's most retrogressive, mean-spirited, and useless anti-immigrant law," the cardinal wrote on his blog. "The tragedy of the law is its totally false reasoning: that immigrants come to our country to rob, plunder, and consume public resources. That is not only false, the premise is nonsense."

Pearce said his legislation is not aimed at immigrants who enter the country legally and comply with its laws.

"We love and admire immigrants who come here to assimilate to be Americans," Pearce said. "This has nothing to do with immigration. It has to do with those who enter our country illegally."

The Republican senator said the cardinal was ignoring the plight of countless crime victims of illegal immigrants, including police officers who have been killed and teenage girls who have been kidnapped and raped. In a high-profile recent case, authorities suspect an illegal immigrant shot and killed Arizona rancher Robert Krentz, who was found dead on his property.

"Where does he stand up for America and the rule of law?" the Republican legislator said of Mahony. "He ought to be embarrassed and he ought to be drummed out as far as I'm concerned."

Several police chiefs spoke out Wednesday against the bill, saying that requiring officers to check for illegal status would drain resources away from fighting more serious crime, dissuade immigrants from cooperating with police and subject officers to charges of racial profiling. The Arizona Assn. of Chiefs of Police cited similar concerns in opposing the Pearce legislation.

"This unfunded mandate will strain underfunded police departments and increase their liability," San Francisco Police Chief George Gascón said in a statement. "It will have a catastrophic effect on policing and set back community policing efforts for decades."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/immigration/la-me-pearce-immig-20100421,0,7995580,print.story

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Tough enforcement against illegal immigrants is decried

Advocates say the deportation case against one Nevada couple highlights the continued harassing of many who pose no threat – despite Obama's promises to target bad actors and help legalize others.

By Ken Dilanian

April 21, 2010

Reporting from Washington

When the Obama administration went before California's 9th Circuit Court last year seeking to deport a middle-class couple from Nevada, one judge criticized the government's case as "horrific." Another labeled it the "most senseless result possible." A third complained of "an extraordinarily bad use of government resources."

"These people have worked hard. They have paid their taxes," Judge William Fletcher said. "Why don't you go after the bad guys?"

The case against the carpenter and the clerk is one of many examples, immigrant rights advocates and labor activists say, of how the Obama administration has continued a policy of tough immigration enforcement against people who are no threat to the United States, even as the administration calls for a new immigration law designed to legalize many of them.

President Obama promised to "target enforcement efforts at criminals and bad-actor employers," said Eliseo Medina, international vice president of the Services Employees International Union, a major Obama backer. "And that would have been the right thing to do. But they have not done that."

Asked by a reporter about the case against Ulises Martinez-Silver and Saturnina Martinez, the Department of Homeland Security said this week that it would indefinitely suspend action against the couple. DHS spokesman Matthew Chandler said the decision reflected the "current enforcement priorities" of pursuing criminals.

But immigrant rights activists and immigration attorneys point to climbing deportation levels and say the government is pursuing untold numbers of equally disturbing cases against students, nannies and janitors.

In one, two Chicago college students, brought to the U.S. by their parents at 13, are facing deportation after being arrested last month on an Amtrak train in Buffalo , N.Y.

"How is that making the country better?" asked Medina, whose union spent millions to help elect Obama.

"People feel betrayed," said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of Center for Community Change, a pro-immigrant group. "The president never said he was going end immigration enforcement, but he sent a clear signal that he would redirect it to a focus on people with criminal records who are a threat to the country. That hasn't happened."

John T. Morton, the former Justice Department prosecutor who runs the Homeland Security Department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, disputed the criticism. His agency has indeed prioritized deporting criminals, he said, noting that removals of such immigrants were slated to increase 40% this year.

"We took an oath to uphold the law," he said, "and we are doing so in a way that prioritizes making our communities safer."

Morton expressed frustration over what he considers exaggerated and unfair charges from immigrant rights activists. The agency frequently allows immigrants to remain even when the law says they should be removed, he said. "We exercise discretion all of the time," Morton said.

Still, some of the most ardent immigration opponents — including Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors stricter immigration curbs — say they have been pleasantly surprised by some of the Obama administration's enforcement measures.

"It's not as bad as I expected it to be," Krikorian said. "This administration understands that you can't make any progress politically on amnesty if you're seen as weak on enforcement."

As a presidential candidate, Obama spelled out his immigration policy in a June 2008 speech at the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic civil rights organization, saying: "When communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids, when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel – when all that is happening, the system just isn't working, and we need to change it."

Bhargava, who along with Medina attended a March White House immigration meeting with the president, concluded that Obama "was genuinely surprised that everybody in the room was united and vociferous that his enforcement policies are destroying families and communities."

An analysis by the nonpartisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University shows that the proportion of criminal immigrants in detention rose from 27% in 2009 to 43% in 2010. However, that statistic reflects only a "relatively small number" of people guilty of serious offences like armed robbery, drug smuggling and human trafficking, the report said. Most are guilty of minor offences such as traffic violations or disorderly conduct. Immigration violations such as illegal entry into the United States are also included.

President Bush and Congress tried and failed to pass an immigration bill in 2007 that would have provided a path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million living here illegally. Obama promised to make overhauling the immigration system a priority in his first year, but the effort is collapsing.

Obama's secretary of Homeland Security, former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, stopped the workplace raids that were common during the Bush administration. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement has continued to arrest and deport hundreds of thousands of the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants each year.

A February memo by James M. Chaparro, ICE's head of detention and removals, disclosed that the agency's goal is to deport 400,000 people a year, up from about 349,000 deported in 2008 and 197,000 in 2005.

The Las Vegas couple at issue in the 9th Circuit case have no criminal records, court records say. They were brought here from Mexico as children, and now have American children of their own, ages 12 and 8.

The couple came to the attention of immigration authorities in 2001, after they were conned into filing a political asylum claim in search of U.S. citizenship. They had paid $3,000 apiece to a "notario," a bogus immigration consultant, who filed the claim. They later withdrew their asylum claim, but it was too late: They had come to the attention of federal officials, and the Homeland Security Department initiated deportation proceedings.

The national law firm Akin Gump took their case, pro bono, into the federal courts.

In a telephone interview, Saturnina Martinez wept as she talked about the prospect of being expelled from the only country she has ever known.

"I paid my taxes. I worked," said Martinez, who came here as an infant. "I don't know why they want to send me to a country I've never even visited."

The three-judge panel concluded it had to grant the government's request to expel the couple. Yet the panel's two Republicans and one Democrat urged immigration authorities to drop the case.

"It's hard for me to understand how the government or how DHS believes the interests of the United States are served by proceeding with this matter," Judge Richard R. Clifton, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, said at last year's hearing.

The case had been going forward until this week, when a reporter e-mailed a transcript of the judges' remarks to senior Homeland Security and ICE officials. However, immigrant rights advocates say thousands of cases like it haven't been subject to reprieves.

"There is one horror story after the next," said Craig Shagin, an immigration attorney in Harrisburg, Pa., who represents several longtime U.S. residents facing deportation despite having American children and no criminal records. "If you're in this business, you see it up close and personal, and it tears you apart."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-immigration-20100422,0,5485585,print.story

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Inland Empire hate groups come into focus

A white supremacist gang is linked to attacks on Hemet police. Experts say the region is fertile ground for such groups.

Robert Faturechi and Richard Winton, Los Angeles Times

April 22, 2010

Reporting from Hemet and Los Angeles

Residents in Hemet have long known that there is a skinhead element in their city.

They said they have occasionally seen groups of tattooed young men with shaved heads in combat boots and fatigues protesting against illegal immigration.

But authorities now are investigating something far more serious: whether white supremacists are behind a series of attacks on Police Department facilities in the Riverside County city.

More than 150 law enforcement officials raided various sites in the area Tuesday, arresting 23 people. Investigators believe the attacks — including a booby trap at a police office — were the work of a white supremacist gang with roots in the area.

Law enforcement officials have been cracking down on such gangs in recent years. Experts who study hate groups said Hemet and surrounding communities are particularly fertile ground for white supremacists. They estimated that there are at least a dozen groups operating in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, said there have been several hate incidents as well as leaflet distributions by white supremacist groups in Riverside County in the last two years, including several believed tied to the election of President Obama.

"There is a significant concentration of hate groups in the Inland Empire, unlike anywhere else in the nation, from the National Socialist Movement to the Hammerskins to" the Comrades of our Racist Struggle, he said.

Ten days after the 2008 presidential election, a 19-year Latino man was beaten by a group of white men in Hemet. Seven members and associates of the Comrades group were arrested by Hemet police, and four were prosecuted. Their trial begins next month. Another member of the gang was recently convicted of witness tampering in the case.

The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department last year arrested members of the Inland Empire Skinheads gang in connection with several home-invasion robberies and an attempted murder case.

Hemet authorities, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case was ongoing, declined to say what groups were under investigation.

The attacks began last year when a booby trap was set at the headquarters of the Hemet-San Jacinto Valley Gang Task Force, officials said. In December, a utility line was redirected to fill the offices with gas. Officials said a spark could have triggered a devastating explosion.

In February, a "zip gun" was hidden by the gate to the task force office and rigged to fire. When a gang officer opened the gate, the weapon went off, and the bullet narrowly missed him, authorities said. In early March, police said, a "dangerous" device was found near the unmarked car of a task force member. That was followed by an arson attack on four city code-enforcement trucks March 23.

There have been many theories over the months about who was responsible for the attacks.

Last month, authorities arrested 33 alleged members of the Vagos motorcycle gang. After the operation, Riverside County Dist. Atty. Rod Pacheco said in an interview that the Vagos were "an extreme threat to law enforcement." But authorities have never formally said that the gang was involved.

Tracie Long, 38, a Hemet sales clerk, said she has seen skinheads in the city but said she's had no dealings with them. She said dozens of skinheads recently congregated on a major street corner to protest pending immigration legislation.

Long said she was skeptical that Tuesday's arrests would solve the mystery of the attacks.

"Until they can prove it, no one knows for sure," she said.

Hemet Police Department Capt. Dave Brown said authorities are being methodical in the case and would not release many details. None of those arrested have yet been charged with crimes related to the case, but Brown said he was "optimistic" they will be soon. The arrests have also produced new leads, he said.

Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, said demographic change in the Inland Empire has helped fuel some white hate groups.

"You have seen a great deal of migration to the Inland Empire and a huge demographic change. And with that change we have seen a lot of conflict," he said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/crime/la-me-0422-hemet-hate-20100422,0,5224500,print.story

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Mahony's personal crusade

The cardinal calls Arizona's anti-immigration legislation ‘mean-spirited.'

Tim Rutten

April 21, 2010

These days, passionate intensity is the usual price of admission to the public square, which makes the temperate and civil tone of Cardinal Roger Mahony's long and constructive contribution to our civic conversation all the more notable.

Even so, there was a particularly angry and personal tone to his denunciation this week of Arizona's SB1070, which has passed that state's Legislature and is awaiting Gov. Jan Brewer's expected signature. The new law would require the state's law enforcement officers to demand that anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally immediately present proof of their legal residency. It makes it a crime for immigrants not to carry their papers. It empowers private citizens to sue any jurisdiction in which the law is not fully enforced.

Writing on his personal blog early Sunday morning, Mahony called the bill "the country's most retrogressive, mean-spirited, and useless anti-immigrant law." He decried its basic premise — "that immigrants come to our country to rob, plunder, and consume public resources" — as tragic "nonsense."

The cardinal attributed Arizona's passage of the law to a federal immigration system that is "completely incapable of balancing our nation's need for labor and the supply of that labor. We have built a huge wall along our southern border, and have posted, in effect, two signs next to each other. One reads, ‘No Trespassing,' and the other reads ‘Help Wanted.'"

SB1070, Mahony wrote, will put Arizona law enforcement into the business of "guessing which Latino-looking or foreign-looking person may or may not have proper documents. That's also nonsense. American people are fair-minded and respectful. I can't imagine Arizonans now reverting to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques whereby people are required to turn one another in to the authorities on any suspicion of (improper) documentation. … Asking ordinary Americans and over-worked law enforcement officers to hunt down people of suspicious legal documentation is ludicrous and ineffective."

As the first cardinal born in Los Angeles, Mahony once told an interviewer that his feeling for immigration's human dimension was shaped by a raid he witnessed as a boy while working in his father's North Hollywood poultry processing plant. "I will never forget them bursting through the doors. I was terrified by it," he said. "And I thought, these poor people; they're here making a living supporting their families. It had a very deep impact on me throughout the years."

In a conversation this week, Mahony said that his decision to speak out against the Arizona statute grew, in part, "from the deep frustration all of us who've been working for comprehensive immigration reform now feel. We need the federal government to step up and fix this situation because the vacuum created by Washington's inaction invites the passage of more laws like this one."

The prelate's personal sense of the immigration situation's human consequences also has been sharpened by a personal project he's recently undertaken — a series of filmed conversations with immigrants who've come to this country without papers.

Although Mahony has gone about that work quietly, he said that "hearing these stories has given me a renewed understanding of what it means to live in our society's shadows, of the fear that's a daily fact of life for so many of our immigrant men and women and of how that fear is deepening."

The cardinal points out that as many as 10 million of the country's estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants live in so-called blended families — those in which some members are citizens and others are not. "I recently spoke with a young woman, a second-year university student," he said. "Her father was deported a year or so ago and, now, every time her mother goes out the door, she and her sisters can't be sure that she'll ever come back. They live with a kind of low-level panic that no one should have to endure."

The cardinal described another conversation with a university graduate, brought to this country by his parents when he was 1 year old, who now can't find work because he lacks proper papers. Mahony also has recorded a conversation with a husband and wife who barely see each other because the husband, who is without papers, thinks it's safest for him to work only the graveyard shift.

Ultimately, the cardinal intends to edit these talks into a series that represents something of the complexity of the immigrant experience, which defies all attempts to reduce it to politics-as-usual. He plans to make the series available on DVD to schools and other groups.

"We want this debate to focus on real people where it belongs," he said, "because when it does, fear disappears."

That's a thing devoutly to be wished, for — as the Arizona debacle demonstrates — this is another of those instances in which fear is the enemy of both reason and justice.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-0421-rutten-20100421-6,0,5930473,print.column

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Cuernavaca new front in Mexico drug war

A kingpin's death has set off a cartel battle in a city long seen as a haven. President Calderon's rhetoric needs to change to recognize the fear now gripping ordinary citizens there and elsewhere.

April 22, 2010

Cuernavaca, in the central Mexican state of Morelos, has long been known as "the city of eternal spring" because of its temperate climate. But now Mexico City's favorite getaway risks being dubbed "the city of eternal rest" for the drug violence that has left a growing number of people in permanent repose.

Cuernavaca made it onto the country's narco map in December when Mexican marines killed kingpin Arturo Beltran Leyva in a shootout at a fancy downtown apartment. The subsequent battle for control of his cartel has left about 50 people dead in the area, a tally that includes six corpses with signs of torture found on the highway to Acapulco last week, though not the undetermined number in three bags of body parts tossed on a busy street in the city. This is the cartel-on-cartel violence that President Felipe Calderon says accounts for 90% of the casualties in the drug war. What has unnerved residents of Cuernavaca, however, was an e-mail purportedly from a drug gang that circulated Friday admonishing them to stay indoors after 8 p.m. or risk being mistaken for "our enemies." The warning served as a curfew. Offices and schools closed early, bars and restaurants shut their doors. Friday night, Cuernavaca itself was dead.

This is not a new tactic, but it is new to Cuernavaca, which not so long ago seemed far from the front in the country's drug war. The fear and violence in central Mexico underscore how Calderon missed the point in a series of tone-deaf comments that have cost him support for his war. A government report leaked last week put the number of dead nationwide at 22,700 since Calderon launched his crackdown on the cartels in December 2006. He noted a little too dismissively that most of those were narcos and their associates. He also has pointed out that Mexico's homicide rate is lower than that of Jamaica and Brazil, Washington and New Orleans, yet they're not branded as danger zones and losing tourists. Mexico has an "image problem," he said at a recent tourism conference. "We have to work on the perception and image of Mexico."

No, actually, this isn't an image problem. It's a real problem to residents of Cuernavaca, Ciudad Juarez and a growing list of cities whose citizens don't care whether things are worse in Rio de Janeiro or Washington. Although it's apparently true that the vast majority of victims have been linked to the cartels, that doesn't account for the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians who have lost their lives in the crossfire, nor does it address the terror people feel. They're locked in their homes and still fear that gunmen will burst through the door, as they did in Ciudad Juarez in February, leaving 15 youths dead at a party celebrating a school soccer victory. Or they're trying to stay off the roads so they don't end up like 10 students shot to death in the state of Durango in March for failing to stop at a drug traffickers' checkpoint on their way to receive government scholarships. They no longer believe that innocents are safe in Mexico. So Calderon needs to listen to his people and adjust his own message.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-cuernavaca-20100422,0,4268081,print.story

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From the New York Times

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At Least 6 People Abducted in Mexican Hotel Raids

MEXICO CITY — Armed men raided two hotels in the center of Monterrey, Mexico 's industrial capital, early Wednesday morning, hauling away four guests and as many as three staff members and sending a wave of panic across a city that has experienced a spate of violent episodes in recent weeks, the authorities said.

Dozens of gunmen were involved in the attacks, which occurred at 3 a.m. and were bold even by Mexican standards. They stormed through numerous rooms on the fifth floor of the Holiday Inn Centro, removing four guests but letting others go. The gunmen also abducted the hotel's receptionist and clashed with a security guard outside the hotel, possibly taking him as well, the authorities said. A receptionist at the Misión Hotel across the street was also abducted, bringing the likely total number of missing people to seven, officials said.

“It could be an organized crime group who was looking for an opposing group,” said Alejandro Garza, the top prosecutor in the state of Nuevo León.

Investigators said the gunmen entered the Holiday Inn with a man who was handcuffed and who told them to go to the fifth floor of the 17-story hotel. Once there, they barged into many rooms. They took one guest's laptop computer. Other guests reported that the gunmen looked inside and left.

In Room 501, the gunmen took Luis Miguel González, a businessman from Mexico City. In Room 502, they abducted Ángel Ernesto Montes de Oca Sánchez, also from Mexico City. Down the hall, they removed Manuel Juárez, also from Mexico City, from Room 511. Nearby, in Room 512, Araceli Hernández, from Reynosa, who registered as a businesswoman, was also taken.

David Salas, the hotel's receptionist, was also taken, along with computer equipment that contained the hotel's guest registry and security tapes, the authorities said. Later, armed men also took the receptionist from a hotel across the street. Initial reports that an American was among the abductees were inaccurate, American officials said.

The affiliation of the gunmen was unknown, although some officials and experts on Mexico's drug gangs suggested that initial evidence pointed to the Zetas, a paramilitary group that engages in drug trafficking and other illegal activities and has been linked to violence in Monterrey. Before storming the hotels, the attackers stole trucks and other vehicles and used them to block access to the area, the authorities said.

“It's absolutely unprecedented,” said George W. Grayson, a professor at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., and the author of “Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State?”

“You now have gunmen blocking off streets so that even if you had competent police, and you don't in Monterrey, they can't get to the place of operation,” he said.

Every day, Mexico's drug traffickers seem to expand their reach and creep closer to people's lives, whether it is a shootout in the hotel district of Acapulco or a note warning of violence in Cuernavaca that was taken so seriously that virtually no one ventured out last Friday.

Carlos Pascual, the American ambassador, delivered a speech to business leaders in Monterrey on Tuesday in which he lamented how violence had increased the cost of doing business in Mexico.

“Unchecked, violence and instability could cause corporations to rethink their business strategy of locating in Mexico,” he said at a dinner of the Monterrey Chapter of the American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico.

Recent violence in Monterrey, including a shootout between soldiers and traffickers that left two students dead at a private university, has clearly unnerved residents. The authorities attribute the violence to the Zetas and rival traffickers who are battling for control of smuggling routes to the United States.

“Monterrey used to be so dynamic that there was a joke that the official bird was the building crane,” Mr. Grayson said. “Now, there's the beginnings of an exodus and it's ‘last one out, turn out the lights.' ”

But Gerardo Ruiz Mateos, the secretary of the economy, told reporters on Wednesday that there was no evidence that violence was hurting investment. “All countries have problems,” he said. “What investors are looking for is strength and firmness in addressing the problem.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/world/americas/22mexico.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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U.S. Offers a Hand to Those on Eviction's Edge

SAN MATEO, Calif. — Two years into a merciless downward spiral, Antonio Moore was threatened with living on the street.

He had lost his $75,000-a-year job as a mortgage consultant, his three-bedroom house with a Jacuzzi, his Lexus sedan. He could no longer pay even the rent on his cramped studio apartment — not on his $10-an-hour part-time job as a fry cook at a fast food restaurant.

Faced with eviction, he was staring last month at the imminent prospect of joining the teeming ranks of the homeless. His last hope was a new $1.5 billion federal program aimed at preventing that fate.

Days after Mr. Moore applied, a check for $775 was on its way to his landlord, enabling him to stay — at least for now.

Much like the Great Depression , when millions of previously working people came to rely on a new social safety net for their sustenance, a swelling group of formerly middle-class Americans like Mr. Moore, 30, is seeking government aid for the first time. Without help, say economists, many are at risk of slipping permanently into poverty, even as economic conditions improve.

The question is whether the modern-day safety net has enough money and the right initiatives to aid those who need it most. The answer could shape whether a considerable slice of the American population will recover from the trauma of recent years, and how long that will take.

The plight of people like Mr. Moore has little to do with the complex, intertwined causes of homelessness of decades past, like substance abuse, mental illness and domestic violence. The current surge stems directly from the recession : Millions have lost their jobs or suffered a sharp drop in earnings. They have drained their savings, losing the ability to pay their rent.

“Nationally, homelessness has now reached crisis proportions not seen since the Great Depression,” says Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.

The severity of the situation prompted the Obama administration to create the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing program within the $787 billion economic stimulus package . The program rests on the assumption that intervention is the best course because once people become homeless, the odds and costs of regaining their lives escalate sharply.

“This allows us to reorient a system that is focused on fixing a problem after it happens to preventing the problem,” said Shaun Donovan , the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development , which oversees the program. “This is the single most important thing the federal government has ever done on family homelessness. It's a transformative tool.”

But a nagging set of questions threatens to constrain the program, say some of the social service agencies administering the money: How should these dollars be distributed, and for whose benefit? In a time of extraordinary need and limited aid, who deserves help?

A similar debate over the fairness of bailing out homeowners has curtailed the administration's efforts to limit foreclosures, say housing experts. Under the homeless prevention program, HUD provides grants to states and local governments that in turn hand money to social service agencies that distribute it into communities. Even as these agencies embrace the program as a crucial source of funds, many complain about mixed messages from the housing department on how to use the money, sowing concerns that vulnerable people may be left out.

On the one hand, HUD tells social service groups that they are supposed to direct prevention dollars only to people who would truly be homeless without aid.

On the other hand, they are supposed to help only those with a good chance to sustain themselves going forward, meaning people who can swiftly resume paying their bills.

“Some communities have read that to mean we should only give it to people who have a job,” says Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, an advocacy organization in Washington. “Those are not the people who are likely to become homeless. My fear is that we're going to spend the money and we're still going to have these enormous increases in homelessness. We won't have reached the people who most need it.”

Social service agencies must front the money, then apply for government reimbursement, making them reluctant to risk aiding anyone who may later turn up in a shelter — an outcome that suggests failure.

“People are afraid they will be chastised,” said Connie M. Pascale, assistant general counsel at Legal Services of New Jersey, which received $38 million in program funds from the state to operate a telephone hot line. “So they have designed their programs very narrowly.”

To Stay in Suburbia

Here in the flatlands of San Mateo, down the peninsula from San Francisco, Roy Perez is the one who decides who deserves help; the deal maker; the man with the checkbook.

A stocky former Marine with a goatee and a master's degree in psychology, he works as an intake manager for the homeless prevention program at Samaritan House, the agency where Mr. Moore went to seek help.

People arrive at his sunny cubicle and describe the bills they cannot pay, the gnawing proximity of the street. Except in cases where he doubts what he is being told — something that has happened perhaps three times in the last month — Mr. Perez is inclined to say yes.

“I have to give this money out,” he says as he prepares for a day in which he will meet six applicants. “It's stimulus money. People need it. That's basically where I'm coming from. I'm not going to lose a night's sleep over whether I gave it to the right person.”

From California to Florida, social service agencies report growing numbers of people who have never previously sought help and are now turning up in homeless shelters after exhausting all options — from staying with relatives and cramming into cheap motels to sleeping in their cars.

From July to September of last year, the number of people turning to emergency homeless shelters and other transitional housing for the first time increased by 26 percent in seven major metropolitan areas surveyed by HUD. New York had a 32 percent increase. Cleveland suffered a jump of 31 percent.

The number of homeless families expanded last year in 19 of the 25 cities surveyed by the United States Conference of Mayors' Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness.

In much of the economy, a sense of repair is palpable, from tentative expansion on the American factory floor to the first significant job creation in more than two years. But for those out of work long-term, the downward spiral turns. Their job prospects dim as their skills and confidence deteriorate.

Once people lose homes, their odds of regaining normalcy lengthen, say poverty experts.

Simply looking for work — let alone getting hired — is harder without a fixed address and access to personal documents. Depression, substance abuse and attendant health problems claim families that lack stable living space and kitchens. Homeless families are a drain on taxpayers, who foot the bill for emergency shelters along with counseling and health care.

In postbubble America, housing is abundant, yet many people cannot afford it. The new program tries to bridge that divide, paying subsidies to landlords to cover rent shortfalls, while adding funds to move people out of shelters and into permanent housing.

At 9:18 in the morning, Dawn Martin sits down opposite Mr. Perez, a look of pained exhaustion on her face.

“We're behind on January and February rent,” she says.

Ms. Martin is mortified to be asking for help. She grew up wealthy, with vacations spent on Caribbean cruises. “I had everything I ever wanted,” she says.

She and her husband run a house-painting business that has been in his family for three generations. (Martin is her maiden name. She declined to be identified by her married name for fear of embarrassing her husband's family, whose name is emblazoned on his truck.)

They have three boys, a 12-year-old, and 9-year-old twins. At the house they have rented for seven years, on a street lined with well-tended lawns, the walls are covered with photos of her boys in their batting stances.

Until 2008, their painting business was pulling in $100,000 a year, which paid their $2,450-a-month rent and allowed them to buy a trailer on Clear Lake, where they took the boys water-skiing.

But last year, in a weak economy, they earned $38,000. They sold their trailer. They ran through $15,000 in savings. One day last winter, Ms. Martin noticed the refrigerator was nearly empty, and her checking account balance was down to $100. She drove to a county office and applied for food stamps.

“That just broke my heart,” she says.

Her father has money to help if it really comes down to it, she acknowledges.

“I don't see him letting his grandkids land on the street,” she says, “but he'd hold it over our heads for a long time. That would lower me to a level that I wouldn't want to go.”

So she is here, at Samaritan House, filling out the paperwork for the homeless prevention program.

“I made appointments and then canceled,” she says. “I finally said, ‘I have to. Money's not going to fall out of the trees for us.' I had to swallow my pride.”

Ms. Martin and her husband need $4,900 to get out of arrears. The painting business is picking up, she tells Mr. Perez. This gives him confidence they should be able to sustain themselves.

But Samaritan House is on pace to run out of money as soon as next year. So Mr. Perez is in conservation mode. He will call the landlord and seek to extract a promise that he will not evict Ms. Martin and her family in exchange for $3,000.

“Is this family going to be homeless?” Mr. Perez says. “If they get nothing, probably. But if the landlord gets $3,000, probably not.”

Who Gets the Help

The discretion wielded by Mr. Perez in determining who receives aid is representative of the overall program. Intent on starting the program quickly, the Obama administration gave considerable latitude to local governments in fashioning their programs, resulting in conspicuous variation. In communities with advanced efforts to address homelessness, the new program has expanded those initiatives. In less-equipped places, the program has stumbled.

“Implementation is all over the place,” says Ms. Foscarinis of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.

In Detroit, where the unemployment rate exceeds 15 percent, the city chose to broadcast the availability of more than $15 million in housing aid, contrary to the advice of experts at social services agencies who feared an unruly money grab. They counseled that applications for cash assistance be handled by established agencies, like legal aid clinics and shelters.

Instead, in early October, the city invited the public to file paperwork en masse at a downtown convention center. Word spread that money would actually be handed out. More than 30,000 people jammed the facility.

Fights broke out and the police were dispatched to restore order, according to the city. Tens of thousands of applications were submitted by people who were not eligible. In the months since, the city has been plowing through the pile of applications, with needy families living on the edge of homelessness caught within the crush of paperwork.

In Pittsburgh, the city chose to set up a call center with surrounding Allegheny County to log preliminary applications. The center was immediately swamped, resulting in a waiting list for help that now exceeds 700 applicants.

The city of Boise, Idaho, has yet to allocate the roughly $750,000 it received for the program through a state grant, bringing accusations from social service groups that local leaders were showing disregard for laid-off workers.

Boise officials say they have tried to get the money out quickly, but have been hindered by rules that bar them from granting money to the local housing authority, the only organization able to manage such a large-scale program.

“Idaho is one of those states that just does not have highly developed social service delivery systems,” said Jim Birdsall, manager of Boise's housing and community development department.

The Obama administration portrays such troubles as inevitable.

“Anytime you have a new effort, particularly of this scale, there are going to be implementation issues,” said Mr. Donovan. “There's going to be some growing pains.”

Over all, he added, the program had helped 64,000 families, as of the end of December. All of the money has now been allocated by state and local governments.

A Spartan Home for Now

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Moore arrives at Samaritan House in a pinstriped suit, a relic from his mortgage days. He has been out in search of work, stepping into retail shops, dropping off résumés.

Throughout his life, he had a knack for making money. His father, a Mexican immigrant, worked as a window washer. His mother was on and off welfare. At 14, he was earning $1,000 a month delivering afternoon newspapers.

In 2004, he was earning $75,000 consulting on mortgages. The following year, he and his wife bought their home in an East Bay suburb for $400,000.

Mr. Moore was driving hundreds of miles to closings all over the state. He was often coming home in the middle of the night, much to the displeasure of his wife. The couple split up in 2007. Then everything fell apart. The mortgage business dried up. He lost the house to foreclosure. He moved into the studio apartment.

By March 2008, he was driving a forklift at a home furnishings store from 7 at night until 4 in the morning.

Needing to pay child support, he took a second job, manning a cash register from 4 a.m. to 1 p.m. at a grocery store. He quit that job because of back pain, he says. He lost the forklift job because he had to take care of his children and could no longer work nights.

He searched frantically for work in the mortgage industry, in customer service, in retail.

“It just seems like no one wants my skills,” he says.

So he took a job at a Red Robin restaurant, where he has gained expertise in frying bacon bits.

“Family focused,” declares a flier on a bulletin board inside the kitchen. “I am treated like a member of the Red Robin family.”

His own family fills out the king-size bed that takes up most of his cave-like apartment. His son and daughter sleep lengthwise, side by side, while Mr. Moore occupies the foot.

He lies there, listening to the hum of his tiny refrigerator and imagining moving to a better place, while relieved to at least have these walls.

He is within striking distance of recapturing stability, he tells himself, if only he can hang on to his apartment long enough to find a better job.

“That's my motivation,” he says. “I can get my life back.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/business/economy/22prevent.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Arizona's Effort to Bolster Local Immigration Authority Divides Law Enforcement

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

PHOENIX — A bill the Arizona Legislature passed this week that would hand the state and local police broad powers to enforce immigration law has split police groups and sown confusion over how the law would be applied.

While Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, has yet to say whether she will sign the bill into law, on Wednesday a national police group condemned it as likely to lead to racial and ethnic profiling and to threaten public safety if immigrants did not report crime or did not cooperate with the authorities out of fear of being deported.

The police group joined a growing list of organizations and religious and political leaders far from the state's borders urging Ms. Brewer to veto the bill. Her spokesman said that of the 15,011 calls and letters her office had received on the bill, more than 85 percent opposed it.

The law would require the police “when practicable” to detain people they reasonably suspected were in the country without authorization. It would also allow the police to charge immigrants with a state crime for not carrying immigration documents. And it allows residents to sue cities if they believe the law is not being enforced.

Members of the Law Enforcement Engagement Initiative, a group of police leaders pressing for a federal overhaul of immigration law, said they worried that other states would copy Arizona, despite the likelihood that the law will be challenged in federal court.

“Just because it is in Arizona doesn't mean it's likely to remain there,” said George Gascón, the chief of the San Francisco Police Department and a former chief in Mesa, a Phoenix suburb. “We are very concerned about what could happen to public safety.”

The Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police and several sheriffs have also come out against the bill, calling it burdensome and an intrusion into a federal matter.

Most police agencies or jails here already check the immigration status of people charged with a crime, in consultation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement , but the new law would expand that power and allows the police to stop people on the suspicion of being in the country without documents.

The Mexican Embassy released a statement expressing concern that the law would lead to racial profiling and damage cross-border relations.

But some of the largest rank-and-file police groups have come out strongly in favor of the bill.

The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, the city police department's largest union, has promoted the bill as a “common sense proactive step in the right direction in the continuing battle on illegal immigration.”

The Fraternal Order of Police, which represents 6,500 officers statewide, endorsed the bill but said it had reservations over the potential costs to departments and the lack of training for local officers to identify who might be in the country illegally.

Bryan Soller, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said if officers ended up arresting large numbers of illegal immigrants, that could add to already crowded jails and costs. Mr. Soller also said departments were worried about the expense of defending any lawsuits by people contending that the law was not being enforced.

But he said he thought many concerns were overblown. His group initially opposed the bill but endorsed it after language was included that he and sponsors believe give officers discretion to use it, in part to ward off federal civil rights claims.

“Some will go out and use it a lot,” Mr. Soller said. “But you are not going to see them doing things much different from what they do now.”

All sides agree that a federal overhaul to better control immigration would help, and advocacy groups, pointing to the Arizona bill, are pushing lawmakers to act soon. But several people involved in the negotiations in Washington said a federal bill was not close to being ready.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/us/22immig.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From the FBI

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Convicted Felon Indicted for Sex Trafficking of a Minor

Pimp Known as “Candyman” Brought a 16-Year-Old Girl to Georgia from South Carolina for the Purpose of Causing Her to Engage in Prostitution

ATLANTA, GA—CHESIRE MARTINEZ ROBINSON, a/k/a “Candyman,” 28, of Austell, Georgia, was arraigned today on federal charges of trafficking of a minor for sex; transporting a minor in interstate commerce for prostitution; and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. ROBINSON, who is being held on unrelated state charges, was arraigned before United States Magistrate Judge Gerrilyn Brill and remains detained.

United States Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said, “The FBI and our other partner law enforcement agencies continue to see the brutal victimization of young girls by men who force them into prostitution, and use violence and intimidation to keep them there. We have charged a number of similar cases this year alone, and will continue to find and prosecute these predators who belong in a federal prison where there is no parole.”

FBI Atlanta Acting Special Agent in Charge Ricky Maxwell said, “Exploiting a minor child by forcing her into prostitution is a despicable act that cannot be tolerated. The FBI funds and operates a task force consisting of agents and officers from the surrounding area who are dedicated to combating child prostitution in the region by targeting those that exploit these minor children.”

According to United States Attorney Yates, the indictment and information presented in court: In or about July 2009, and continuing through on or about October 2, 2009, ROBINSON allegedly caused the victim, a 16-year-old girl, to engage in prostitution at various hotels and at a truck stop, in the Atlanta area. ROBINSON brought the victim, who he knew to be a minor, from her home in South Carolina to the Atlanta area. He then placed photographs of the victim in escort and erotic services sections of various Internet websites, and used those ads to recruit men to engage in commercial sex acts with the victim. When the girl refused to engage in commercial sex acts, ROBINSON allegedly beat the victim on several occasions. During a search of ROBINSON's apartment on October 2, 2009, investigators found a 9 mm pistol that belonged to ROBINSON, who had previously been convicted of the felony offense of armed robbery in Cobb County, Georgia.

The indictment charges ROBINSON with conspiracy; sex trafficking of a minor; transporting a minor in interstate commerce for the purpose of prostitution; and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. The charges carry a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years, up to a combined, maximum sentence of life imprisonment, and a fine of up to $1,000,000.

This case is being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Metro Atlanta Child Exploitation Task Force.

Members of the public are reminded that the indictment contains only allegations. A defendant is presumed innocent of the charges and it will be the government's burden to prove a defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.

Assistant United States Attorney Richard S. Moultrie, Jr. is prosecuting the case.

For further information please contact Sally Quillian Yates, United States Attorney, or Charysse L. Alexander, Executive Assistant United States Attorney, through Patrick Crosby, Public Affairs Officer, U.S. Attorney's Office, at (404) 581-6016. The Internet address for the HomePage for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Georgia is www.usdoj.gov/usao/gan .

http://atlanta.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel10/at042110.htm

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Second Former Greenville Policeman Pleads Guilty in Homeless Abuse Case

COLUMBIA, SC—Acting United States Attorney Kevin F. McDonald stated today that former Greenville, South Carolina, police officer Jeremiah Carlton Milliman, age 29, pled guilty today in federal court in Greenville to an information charging two counts of deprivation of rights under color of law, a violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 242. United States Magistrate Judge William M. Catoe accepted the plea and will sentence Milliman at a later date.

Milliman admitted in court that on consecutive days in September 2009, he assaulted homeless individuals whom he and other officers had just arrested, handcuffed, and secured in a patrol car. In the first incident, Milliman entered the backseat of the patrol car where the handcuffed man was sitting alone, and struck him in the face with his forearm after the man yelled out, busting the man's lip. In the second incident, Milliman entered the backseat of the patrol car where a deaf-mute homeless individual was handcuffed and secured. Milliman poked the man with an ink pen, making the man audible a sound that Milliman found amusing. He poked him again so that nearby officers would hear the sound. Milliman then poured a hand sanitizing liquid on the man's head. Another officer later wiped the liquid off the man's head before he was transported to jail.

Milliman is the second Greenville police officer to plead guilty in the case, which arose after other officers in the Greenville Police Department alerted supervisors last year that a small group of officers were engaged in abusive and humiliating conduct towards the city's homeless population. Last month Matthew Scott Jowers pled guilty to one count of deprivation of rights under color of law, admitting that he slammed a homeless arrestee into a patrol car with such force that he dented the car.

Both Milliman and Jowers are no longer with the Greenville Police Department, and both have agreed to be de-certified as law enforcement officers. Both remain free on bond until sentencing.

“Law enforcement officers are sworn to protect and serve, not to abuse and humiliate. The conduct here was unconscionable and indeed criminal. Our office will prosecute those in authority positions who violate their sworn oath and deny members of the public their civil rights,” stated Mr. McDonald.

Mr. McDonald stated the maximum penalty Milliman can receive is a fine of $200,000 and imprisonment for two years. Jowers faces one year in prison and a $100,000.00 fine.

Mr. McDonald said the investigation is ongoing and other charges may be forthcoming.

The case was investigated by agents of the FBI and SLED. The case is being prosecuted by Acting United States Attorney Kevin F. McDonald and Trial Attorneys Gerard Hogan and Christopher Lomax of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

http://columbia.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel10/co042110.htm

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