July 30, 2010

Reporting from Phoenix

Hundreds of marchers protesting Arizona's hard-line stance against illegal immigration took to the streets Thursday even as the local sheriff launched raids to arrest illegal migrants — vivid signs that the court ruling stopping most of a controversial state law will not quell the furious debate over immigration here.

And as expected, the state swiftly appealed the ruling by U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton, who on Wednesday temporarily halted key parts of the law one day before they were to take effect.

The protesters began marching well before dawn, fanning out across the city, staging acts of civil disobedience and arguing that Arizona remains inhospitable to immigrants. Dozens of protesters were arrested.

"It's not over yet," said Vanessa Bustos, 24, of Phoenix, who chained herself to five other activists, blocking the door to the Maricopa County jail. "There are other bills being enacted against the Latino community."

Showing that Arizona can take strong steps against illegal immigrants despite the ruling, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio launched his 17th sweep Thursday, in which his deputies and volunteers stop people for sometimes minor violations, such as jaywalking, and then check their immigration status — which police are already allowed to do under existing law.

Arpaio has said the temporary injunction against the law, SB 1070, doesn't stop him from driving illegal immigrants from the state.

"Nothing is going to deter this sheriff and my office, including rulings by the federal judge," Arpaio told reporters at a midday news conference. "It's going to be business as usual."

In the state's appeal, Gov. Jan Brewer asked the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the temporary injunction as soon as possible. Oral arguments could occur in September.

"We are a nation of laws and we believe they need to be enforced," Brewer said in a statement. "If the federal government wants to be in charge of illegal immigration and they want no help from states, it then needs to do its job."

Technically, SB 1070 took effect Thursday, but Bolton's ruling — issued after the Obama administration sued and contended the law interfered with federal immigration enforcement — barred most of its provisions until a trial on the bill's constitutionality. The key provisions would have required police to determine the status of people they lawfully stop and also suspect are in the country illegally. The law also would have made it a state crime to lack immigration documents.

Brewer signed the bill April 23, arguing it was needed to protect the state from drug violence seeping across the border from Mexico.

Some of the measure's supporters argued that the provisions halted by Bolton would not have changed much on the ground here. Everyone booked into the jails in the state's most populous counties has his or her status checked. Police officers can already ask anyone they choose about his or her immigration status.

Mark Spencer, board president of the Phoenix Law Enforcement Assn., a police union that is a strong backer of the law, said SB 1070 merely would have required other agencies to employ procedures widely used in Phoenix.

"We were test-driving SB 1070" in Phoenix, Spencer said. "Now we're going to take it on a long-term road trip. Nothing changed for the Phoenix Police Department."

The law makes "attrition through enforcement" Arizona's official policy, meaning the state will take whatever legal steps it can to make life unpleasant for illegal immigrants and persuade them to leave.

Despite the court victory, immigrant rights activists decided to follow through with protests scheduled Thursday, when the entire law was to have taken effect. Polls have shown that SB 1070 is highly popular in Arizona, and marchers said the injunction doesn't change how immigrants and Latinos are treated here.

"We live here in a climate of fear," said Alfredo Gutierrez, a former Democratic state senator who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2002. He joined about 100 people on a two-mile march from the state Capitol at 4:30 a.m. and was later arrested. "The context of Arizona is foreign to this country. This is basically a nation that's become hostile to its own people."

Channtal Polanco, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen, was one of several people who have staged a 24-hour vigil at the state Capitol during the 104 days since the Legislature passed SB 1070. On Thursday morning, she said she was inspired by a cousin who had asked if Polanco would be guardian to his daughter should he and his wife be deported.

"That broke my heart," Polanco said.

Since 2004, Arizona has passed a series of laws aimed at illegal immigrants — tightening restrictions on identification needed to vote, limiting the ability of illegal immigrants to post bail after arrest and dissolving companies who hire them. Recent bills have been interpreted by some as a straight-out attack on Latinos — a law that seeks to eliminate a Mexican American studies program and a regulation that stops teachers with accents from teaching certain public school classes.

On Thursday the demonstrations started quietly, with the predawn march to a downtown church, led by women holding images of the Virgin of Guadalupe. After a 90-minute service, the growing crowd marched to the downtown high-rise that houses Arpaio's executive offices.

Marchers waved signs that said "We reject racism" and "No more raids."

Gloria Lopez, 36, and her husband, Roberto, are both illegal immigrants who live in Phoenix. They have six U.S.-born children, have been here 22 years and hold steady jobs. "The American Dream doesn't exist," Gloria Lopez said. "We aren't free."

Lopez said she and her family continue to live in fear of the sheriff. "Señor Arpaio, with the law or without the law, he's going to continue."

Demonstrators eventually disobeyed police orders to remain on the sidewalks, spilling out into the wide thoroughfare and blocking traffic. Police arrested more than two dozen there and at the jail. (In Los Angeles, about a dozen protesters against SB 1070 were arrested after blocking portions of Wilshire Boulevard.)

Kristin Larson, 36, watched the Phoenix protests in disgust, holding a handwritten sign supporting Arpaio. "I see this happening over and over again, and I don't see support for the other side," said Larson, who works downtown and watches regular protests against Arpaio. She said she was frustrated by people from outside Arizona criticizing the state.

"The border needs to be secured and they need to find a way to fix it," Larson said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-arizona-immigration-law-20100730,0,7625100,print.story

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Supreme Court leery of broad challenges to yet-to-take-effect state laws

Some experts say the tack of the judge who blocked parts of the Arizona law leaves her ruling vulnerable to reversal on appeal. But it may stand if the high court follows precedent on immigration.

By David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau

July 29, 2010

The Supreme Court, where the legal controversy over Arizona's immigration law is likely to be resolved, has taken a dim view in recent years of judges striking down state laws based on broad challenges to laws that have not taken effect.

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton agreed Wednesday with the Obama administration that much of the Arizona law was unconstitutional "on its face," without waiting for evidence that individuals were hurt or had their rights violated by state officials.

In her ruling, Bolton read the Arizona law broadly to apply to "all arrestees" in the state, not just those for whom there is a "reasonable suspicion" they are in the country illegally, as the state's lawyers interpreted the law. Relying on her understanding of the law's scope, Bolton said it was unconstitutional because legal immigrants and U.S. citizens "will necessarily be swept up" by it.

Some legal experts say the judge's approach leaves her ruling vulnerable to being reversed on appeal.

"She rejected the state's own interpretation of its statute, which is fundamental error in my view," said John Eastman, a law professor and former dean at Chapman University School of Law in California. "And she struck it down on a facial challenge, which is another significant error."

Yale law professor Peter Schuck agreed that the judge might have acted too soon. "By entertaining a facial challenge rather than waiting for an 'as applied' challenge, she jumped the gun," he said. Doing so left her without "the benefit of a real set of facts to use in assessing the statute's meaning and constitutionality," he said. "She also gave short shrift to the presumption of constitutionality that federal judges are supposed to bring to any challenge to state statutes."

However, Bolton's decision may stand if the Supreme Court follows its precedents on immigration, which have held that the responsibility for immigration law rests entirely with the federal government. Her opinion relied heavily on a 1941 ruling in which the justices struck down a Pennsylvania law that required aliens to carry an identification card. She quoted Justice Hugo Black's comment that such a state identification system would infringe on "the personal liberties of law-abiding aliens" and subject them to threat of "police surveillance."

Experts in immigration law generally gave Bolton high marks in following the court's past precedents. "It's a careful and well-reasoned opinion," said Hiroshi Motomura, a UCLA law professor. She followed the long-standing court precedent that said immigration enforcement is for the federal government, not the states, he said.

The judge focused on one sentence of the Arizona law that said, "Any person who is arrested shall have the person's immigration status determined before the person is released." Even though the state said it was targeting illegal immigrants, Bolton said its law as written would affect "the lives of legally present aliens and even United States citizens."

"That's a powerful and important aspect of this opinion. She recognized this is going to lead to harassment and interrogation of people who are here lawfully," said American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Omar Jadwat.

On Thursday, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to lift the judge's order in early September and allow the law to take effect.

If the state loses before the liberal-leaning 9th Circuit, it is almost sure to appeal to the more conservative Supreme Court.

The outcome there may depend on whether the justices rely on their past precedents on immigration or follow their more recent skepticism toward broad challenges to state laws.

Led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the court in the last five years has insisted on narrower, targeted suits that challenge how laws work in actual practice.

The Supreme Court will hear a different Arizona immigration case this fall. The state wants to dissolve any business that repeatedly and knowingly hires illegal immigrants. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, joined by the Obama administration, say this state regulatory measure should be struck down because it conflicts with federal immigration law.

The outcome could shape the battle over the Arizona arrest law, said Temple University law professor Peter Spiro. "There's a good chance the court will use this lower profile case to make a broad pronouncement" on the state's authority to enforce immigration, he said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-immig-legal-20100730,0,2407774,print.story

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Arizona's immigration law: aimed at criminals or at workers?

It all depends on whether one equates 'illegal immigrant' with evil-doers or with laborers.

Hector Tobar

July 30, 2010

Some people look at an impoverished immigrant laborer and immediately think "illegal," with all the stigma that word carries.

Others see that same person and think: There goes a worker.

Betty Madden, a 65-year-old costume designer, told me that when she thinks of immigrants, she thinks about their labor — the folding of linens, the cleaning of bathrooms. Once she was arrested in a Los Angeles protest supporting mostly immigrant hotel workers who perform those tasks. She stood up for them because she's a member of the stage crafts union and loyal to the labor movement.

"In a union, any time you feel you're being attacked or singled out in some way, you have a community to stand up for you," she said.

Along with nearly 600 other union workers and leaders, Madden planned to travel to Phoenix on Thursday, the day SB 1070 was scheduled to take effect.

A federal judge this week blocked most of the law's provisions. But Madden and the activists went anyway, symbolically carrying no documents.

To some, it might seem odd that union workers would protest a law designed to speed the removal of undocumented immigrants. After all, those immigrants are supposedly lowering our wages and busting our state and local budgets.

But the bus riders didn't see it that way. They were more worried about the potential of the law to intimidate legal immigrants, who happen to make up a big chunk of the union workforce in L.A., Phoenix and other cities of the Southwest.

"It's important for white folks like myself who have a little bit of privilege to stand up and say this is wrong," said Dan Barnhart, an L.A. teacher and native of Tempe, Ariz., who also went on the ride.

Barnhart is one of the legions of Angelenos who don't believe illlegal immigrant equals criminal. When he thinks of illegal immigrants, he thinks of people who need his help.

He thinks of a girl he knows, of elementary school age, who is just starting to become aware that the border crossing she made when she was a baby will cast a pall over her future. And a brilliant, English-speaking teenage girl he knows whose future education is in doubt because college financial aid is largely unavailable to her.

"She's a brilliant person who did everything right in her life," Barnhart said of the teenager. "And yet there are people willing to say, 'Sorry, you broke the law when you were 18 months old.'" Barnhart thinks such an attitude violates basic American notions of fairness.

Of course, I agree with Barnhart. So do a lot of other people. That's why most Americans back the notion that we should give most illegal immigrants a path to citizenship — a whopping 81% of Americans, according to a CNN poll released Wednesday.

And yet, the same poll shows a majority of Americans — 55%— backed the Arizona immigration law.

It seems to me that Americans are of two minds about the immigration question. They like the immigrants they know personally and are willing to extend this generosity of spirit to many of those who've entered the country illegally. At the same time, they believe the United States is a country of laws and want a system where those laws are respected.

But I'm certain it's only a small minority of Americans that truly believes, as one reader put it to me, that illegal immigrants are an "invading criminal army" bent on destroying America. Unfortunately, that minority put its stamp on SB 1070 — even though stats show crime is actually down in Arizona in recent years and numerous studies show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native-born.

"There's a lot of fear out there, and when there's fear it leads to prejudice and anger," said Shahe Keshishian, a 39-year-old home healthcare worker, and another member of the bus caravan.

Keshishian said he worried that SB 1070 was liable to lead to the same kind of racial profiling he's suffered at the airport at the hands of Homeland Security.

"People, they think I'm Arab or Muslim," said Keshishian, an evangelical Christian and U.S. citizen of Armenian descent.

Depending on your point of view, what Keshishian suffers at the airport is either racial profiling or a mere inconvenience suffered by a few in the name of keeping us all safe. Whatever it is, a small minority of very angry Americans is willing to force legal immigrants and many Latinos to pay a similar price if it will rid the country of illegal immigrants.

They feel this way, it seems to me, because they've embraced a mythology that equates the undocumented with inherent criminality. In their eyes, people are crossing the border not to be gardeners and nannies, but rather to work for the drug cartels, live off the public dime and steal Americans' identities.

A number of shameless politicos are pandering to this way of thinking and fueling the flames of prejudice.

Last month, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank did a wonderful job of dissecting Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's and Sen. John McCain's exaggerations and falsehoods about the alleged illegal immigrant threat. Brewer, for instance, spoke of beheadings in the Arizona desert that have never taken place.

And last year, I dedicated a column to dispelling 10 statistics circulating on the Internet about the cost of illegal immigration to California. I discovered that many of those "facts" were pure fiction.

Thankfully, most Americans can see hysteria about the "illegals" for what it really is.

Madden told me one of the reasons she went to Arizona is precisely because she can't stand all the "radical" rhetoric she's hearing.

"People spew misinformation and misguided values," she told me. "They get a sympathetic ear because there are so many misinformed people. You have to get on board the fantasy."

It's wrong to blame undocumented immigrants for all that ails America. But it's not a pipe dream to work toward an orderly immigration system in which the law is respected by all and we recognize the labor of those who've worked hard and risked much to be here.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-tobar-20100730,0,6258110,print.column

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Shirley Sherrod vows to sue conservative blogger who misrepresented her remarks

July 29, 2010

Shirley Sherrod, the African American federal agriculture official who was forced out of her job after a conservative blogger posted a heavily edited portion of a speech she had made, said Thursday that she believes her experience provides a fresh opportunity for a discussion of race issues in the nation.

"If the suffering I've endured and the joy I've felt gets that discussion back out there, we've got to deal with it," said Sherrod, who made her remarks at a panel discussion entitled "Context and Consequences" at the annual convention of the National Assn. of Black Journalists being held in San Diego.

Sherrod's forced resignation as director of rural development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture has touched off a highly charged discussion nationwide about journalism, race, and politics. She was forced out July 19 after conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart posted a small portion of the video of a speech Sherrod had given.

In the part of the speech that was posted, Sherrod appeared to indicate that she would not help a white farmer as she would a black farmer. In reaction, the NAACP condemned her and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack ordered her resignation.

But when the fuller context was made public, it was obvious that Sherrod's speech had carried the opposite message: the need to transcend race and to help all poor people without regard to race. The white farmer appeared on national television to defend Sherrod and say that without her intervention decades ago he would have lost his farm to foreclosure.

Those revelations brought an apology to Sherrod from the White House and an offer from Vilsack of another job in the department. Sherrod is said to be considering that offer.

Sherrod, 62,  said Thursday she will sue Breitbart. She said he has not offered her an apology, nor does she want one.

She also repeated her invitation to President Obama to accompany her on a tour of rural Georgia landmarks of the civil rights movement, in which she and her husband, Charles, were active.

Saying that many Americans, black or white, don't know  much about the height of the civil rights movement a half a century ago, Sherrod said of Obama, "I need to have him down there so I can take him around and show him some of that history.  He should come and see and hear that firsthand."

Responding to questions, Sherrod said she believes the White House is a llowing vocal conservative journalists and bloggers "to decide how to govern."   But she said bears no ill feelings toward the NAACP, which condemned her before seeing the entire video, nor Vilsack.

"It's not about me," she said, "It's about us and all we have to accomplish."

Sherrod said she was buoyed by the response once the entire video was revealed:

"I've gone from feeling like such a failure ... to feeling very, very great with all the support that's come forth."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/07/shirley-sherrod-speech.html

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Answers found in the 10th Amendment

It makes clear that immigration is a federal matter and that marriage belongs to the state.

By Ruthann Robson

July 30, 2010

The words of the Constitution do not change whether they are being applied to immigration or same-sex marriage, or whether the statute is from California, Massachusetts or Arizona. The 10th Amendment is often cited to support the constitutionality of Arizona's immigration law as a matter of "states' rights." That same 10th Amendment is cited to support the unconstitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits federal recognition of Massachusetts' same-sex marriages. To agree with one outcome and not the other can be misconstrued as partisan. If the 10th Amendment is good for the goose, it must be good for the gander, although whether conservatives or liberals are ganders is a bit unclear.

But though it may seem that the neutral principles expressed in the 10th Amendment demand uniform results, this isn't quite true. The amendment states: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." And therein lies the rub. What powers are delegated to the federal government by the Constitution? And which are not? And how do we decide?

The text of the Constitution is the obvious place to start. The Constitution provides that the federal government has powers of "naturalization" and regulating commerce with foreign nations (Article I, Section 8). It also prohibits states from entering treaties (Article I, Section 10). While immigration (as opposed to citizenship after immigration) is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, there is a provision that comes close. Article I, Section 9 specifically limits congressional power: "The migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person."

The provision is, of course, rooted in the slave trade. But by limiting congressional power until a certain date — 1808 — the implication is clear that migration of persons was intended to be an ordinary federal, rather than state, power.

In addition to the text, the history of constitutional interpretation is another guidepost to who has what powers. The DOMA litigation is not the first time Massachusetts has relied on the 10th Amendment. Massachusetts passed a statute barring state vendors from doing business with Myanmar (previously Burma). The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down the statute under the "supremacy clause," not even mentioning the 10th Amendment. It was sufficient that there were presidential and congressional powers to develop a comprehensive national and international strategy.

Marriage, of course, does not appear in the Constitution, so judicial interpretation is where we find guidance on this issue. The federal courts shy away from family law. The U.S. Supreme Court has declared only a handful of state marriage laws unconstitutional, the most famous example being the Virginia statute criminalizing interracial marriage. But when striking down congressional statutes, the high court has repeatedly touted marriage and family law as the unquestionable domain of state, rather than federal, power. No matter how contentious they may seem, divorces and child custody disputes rarely become federal cases.

Finally, there are also our common practices and understandings about the difference between immigration and marriage. If you have a passport, its navy blue cover bears the seal "United States of America," not, for example, Colorado or California. You need not present your passport when you cross the George Washington Bridge or the Hoover Dam. On the other hand, if you have a marriage certificate, it is embossed with the name of the state in which you obtained the license, rather than "the United States." If you have a divorce decree, it likewise bears the name of the state court in which you obtained the judgment.

By constitutional text, established interpretation and everyday practice, immigration is a federal matter and marriage is a state concern. When it comes to applying a neutral principle such as the 10th Amendment — powers not given to the federal government are reserved for the states or people — the very impartiality of the principle may yield inconsistent outcomes.

Ruthann Robson is a professor at City University of New York School of Law.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-robson-10th-amendment-20100730,0,5923523,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Population Research Presents a Sobering Prognosis

By SAM ROBERTS

With 267 people being born every minute and 108 dying, the world's population will top seven billion next year, a research group projects, while the ratio of working-age adults to support the elderly in developed countries declines precipitously because of lower birthrates and longer life spans.

In a sobering assessment of those two trends, William P. Butz, president of the Population Reference Bureau, said that “chronically low birthrates in developed countries are beginning to challenge the health and financial security of the elderly” at the same time that “developing countries are adding over 80 million to the population each year and the poorest of those countries are adding 20 million, exacerbating poverty and threatening the environment.”

Projections, especially over decades, are vulnerable to changes in immigration , retirement ages, birthrates, health care and other variables, but in releasing the bureau's 2010 population data sheet, Carl Haub, its senior demographer, estimated this week that by 2050 the planet will be home to more than nine billion people.

Even with a decline in birthrates in less developed countries from 6 children per woman in 1950 to 2.5 today (and to 2 children or less in Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Iran , Thailand and Turkey), the population of Africa is projected to at least double by midcentury to 2.1 billion. Asia will add an additional 1.3 billion.

While the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand will continue to grow because of higher birthrates and immigration, Europe, Japan and South Korea will shrink (although the recession reduced birthrates in the United States and Spain and slowed rising birthrates in Russia and Norway).

In Japan, the population of working-age people, typically defined as those 15 to 64, compared with the population 65 and older that is dependent on this younger group, is projected to decline to a ratio of one to one, from the current three to one. Worldwide, the ratio of working age people for every person in the older age group is expected to decline to four to one, from nine to one now.

Earlier this week, Eurostat , the statistical arm of the 27-nation European Union , reported that while the union's population topped a half billion this year, 900,000 of the 1.4 million growth from the year before resulted from immigration. Eurostat has predicted that deaths will outpace births in five years, a trend that has already occurred in Bulgaria, Latvia and Hungary.

While the bulge in younger people, if they are educated, presents a potential “demographic dividend” for countries like Bangladesh and Brazil, the shrinking proportion of working-age people elsewhere may place a strain on governments and lead them to raise retirement ages and to encourage alternative job opportunities for older workers.

Even in the United States, the proportion of the gross domestic product spent on Social Security and Medicare is projected to rise to 14.5 percent in 2050, from 8.4 percent this year.

The Population Reference Bureau said that by 2050, Russia and Japan would be bumped from the 10 most populous countries by Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/world/30population.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Firing Line

By MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ

One June morning last year, Jack Dailey drove from his home in North Carolina's Piedmont country, through verdant, hilly farmland to a rifle range near the town of Ramseur. Eleven men and a woman had mustered there for a weeklong boot camp run by the Appleseed Project, a group Dailey started that is dedicated to teaching every American how to fire a bullet through a man-size target out to 500 yards. So far Appleseed has taught 25,000 people to shoot; 7,000 more will learn by the end of this year. Its instructors teach this skill not for the purpose of hunting or sport. They see marksmanship as fundamental to Americans' ability to defend their liberty, whether against foreigners or the agents of a (hypothetical) tyrannical government. Appleseed frames this activity as being somewhere between a historical re-enactment and a viable last resort. I came to find out how serious they were.

Dailey, Appleseed's founder and rhetorician in chief, is a tall man with silver hair. He wore black sneakers, a red polo shirt tucked into jeans and a red baseball cap. Sixty-six years old, he could have been a grandfather spending a leisurely morning on a public golf course if not for his unyielding expression and his voice, which is well equipped for the stirring up of men.

In the previous day's lecture, Dailey discussed taxes — the situation of the American taxpayer, he said, compared unfavorably with the lives of slaves in ancient Egypt. Today he got down to the matter at hand: defense against overweening government. “Look at the choice those guys made,” he said, referring to the colonial-era militia. “I'll post you 65 yards from the road. In a few hours there's gonna be hundreds of redcoats marching down that road. Your liberty depends on you stopping 'em.”

Two lead musket balls were passed around the clubhouse, through the hands of a camouflaged Navy midshipman, two sheriff's deputies, a farm-owning factory worker, a college professor, a pilot, a retiree and a high-school sophomore. Those who shot an “expert” score on Dailey's qualification test would become “riflemen,” as designated by olive-green patches. For now, most of these novice shooters were referred to as “cooks.”

“When you fire that first shot, those redcoats are gonna be mad,” Dailey said. “They're gonna come at you with those 16-inch bayonets. There'll be three or four of 'em before you load your second shot.” He paused. Thoughts of bayonets seemed to linger in the silent room. “Not much percentage in that choice. We know now that they won. But for them? No guarantees.”

The Appleseed Project began with commentaries Dailey writes, under the byline of “Fred,” that run beside advertisements for his surplus-rifle-stock business in the magazine Shotgun News. In 2005, he organized his first Appleseed shoots in Wyoming and Texas. The combination of military-style rifle training, star-spangled rhetoric and low cost ($70 for two days; free for women, minors and military personnel) proved catching. Word of the program spread through gun culture and survivalist Web sites. The tax filings of the Revolutionary War Veterans Association, the nonprofit group that oversees Appleseed, show that the group now has $334,000 in cash. The Appleseed Web site lists as many as 100 shoots a month on the outskirts of towns like Eureka, Kan., Pine Bluffs, Wyo., and Coeur D'Alene, Idaho.

At the North Carolina shoot, the cooks came from Georgia, Florida, Illinois and Ohio, bearing .22-caliber Rugers and Marlins outfitted with custom sights — what Appleseed calls Liberty Training Rifles. Though they were diverse in age and class, their uniformly white skin, down-home talk and traditional values suggested a common attachment to an America that had lost its long-held claim to the cultural center. While Dailey has said Appleseed should be apolitical, the talk at this Appleseed boot camp and at several others I attended across the country over the course of a year contained pieces of a conversation that has unfolded behind the motley carnivals of the Tea Party movement : a serious deliberation on the right about the nature of the American founding and the limits of incivility. Sharron Angle , the Republican nominee for Senate in Nevada who is campaigning against Harry Reid , has spoken of the possibility of “Second Amendment remedies” for Congressional action. “The nation is arming,” she told The Reno Gazette-Journal in May. “What are they arming for if it isn't that they are so distrustful of their government? They're afraid they'll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways. That's why I look at this as almost an imperative. If we don't win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?” Rick Barber, a Republican candidate for Congress in Alabama, has broadcast an ad in which an actor dressed as George Washington declares, “Gather your armies.”

Are statements like these rhetorical flourishes or calls to arms? Determining whether this revolutionary talk constitutes a threat comes down to finding the fine line between expressing anger and inciting the angry to action, a distinction that is clear as a matter of law but less so in cultural practice. In April, on the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, former President Bill Clinton sought to move this cultural line, comparing today's antigovernment sentiment with that of the mid-'90s. Clinton argued that those who demonize the federal government could be courting another tragedy. There is, however, a rejoinder to this from the right. “The sense in the year 2010 that there's something threatening about civilian marksmanship is a function of 1990s political correctness and guilt by association,” Nick Dranias, director of the Center for Constitutional Government at the Goldwater Institute, said. “These groups are trying to take guns out of the shadows and display them proudly, in public, not as a bunch of weirdos crawling around the forest at night.”

Inside the Appleseed Project, the question of where an armed citizenry should draw this line remains open. Later that week, as he sipped a Coke at a nearby McDonald's, Dailey flirted with an answer. “If you ever have to reach for your guns, you've lost before you started,” he said, and then doubled back. “Now, there are probably some narrow, hypothetical exceptions to that. Like if somebody in the government said, ‘We're taking over the country.' You might find there'd be a spontaneous. . . . I don't know. I don't know what it would be. And to be perfectly honest with you, I wouldn't want to see it.”

The ?rst night's campfire sounded less like sedition and more like men telling stories of times they looked death in the eye. Ron Vandiver, the boot camp's head instructor, made death's acquaintance while trying to repair a swaying radio tower on a stormy afternoon. Vandiver is the kind of man that Dailey likes to characterize as a “regular American,” words intended as the highest praise. A stout 42-year-old with a gadget-laden belt, he looked like a dad I might see at Home Depot. His eyes watered up when he spoke of an ancestor who fought in the Continental Army. He asked how far back each of us could feel our national history as opposed to just reading about it. “The war between the states,” one man said. “World War II,” another said. “That's a shame,” Vandiver said. “We're here to extend your historical horizon of empathy.”

The main zones for projecting the past onto the present were the “redcoats,” paper targets stapled to wooden poles at 25 meters. Four red silhouettes represented kills at 100, 200, 300 and 400 yards. On the third day the cooks moved to the 500-yard range, where they fired AR-15's, M1As, and M1 Garands. In the middle of the firing line lay David and Darrell Garvey, two brothers with sun-reddened skin and graying beards. Before the housing crash, the Garveys grossed as much as $1 million a year installing floors in vacation homes. Now they were unemployed. They loaded their magazines and pulled the charging handles. “Ready on the right!” Vandiver bellowed. “Ready on the left! All ready on the firing line. . . . Fire!”

Darrell Garvey pressed his eye to the scope, trying to keep a red dot fixed on the blurry figure in the distance. He stilled his breathing and slowly squeezed the trigger. “Cease fire!” Vandiver shouted. “Unload and clear!” Darrell disarmed his rifle. He walked up the slope to his target and huffed in exasperation. A few shots hadn't even hit the paper.

Darrell turned to Vandiver. “If, God forbid, the worst happens and this all becomes reality, would you recommend shooting out at 500 or waiting 'til they came closer in?”

“I'm too old and fat to run fast,” Vandiver answered. “So I like to give myself as big a head start as possible. On a two-way shooting range, I'm inclined to hit them out at 500.”

“Fred's Plan to Save America,” an early photocopied manifesto, sets forth a doctrine of deterrence. Shooting is “training for the Day,” Dailey wrote. “The Day that will never come, if enough of us are ready for it.” Appleseed occasionally attracts those who believe this Day is already here. Dailey calls such fringe beliefs “the dark side.” One man at an Appleseed boot camp in Nevada announced his plan to assassinate county officials and ignite a guerrilla war. “It kinda floored me when he blurted that out,” Dailey recalls. “We fight this militia stuff all the time. If there's the slightest truth to what he said, he was a dead man. Which means there's probably no truth at all.” In Ramseur, Dailey's rousing talk was followed by an introduction to the “soft war” fought with “ballots, not bullets.” Dailey did not say how the ballots should be cast, but I did meet many senior Apple­seed instructors with affinities for The Limbaugh Letter and Tea Party rallies (all of whom nonetheless obeyed the prohibition on partisan discussions during the program itself).

Last fall, a report by the Anti-Defamation League called Appleseed part of a trend in which romanticized notions of armed resistance have “percolated beyond extremist groups and movements into the mainstream.” It stopped short of saying Appleseed was itself an extremist group, though Mark Pitcavage, the A.D.L.'s director of investigative research, characterized Appleseed as a potential gateway to militias. “I'm concerned not in the sense that I think the Appleseed Project is dangerous,” he told me. “But it does have a goal of indoctrination.”

But the sociologist James William Gibson, whose book “Warrior Dreams” analyzed civilian paramilitary culture since the mid-'70s, says Appleseed and the broader movement around it are unlikely to pose a danger to civil society. “When a culture is in crisis, the first response is often to go back to the creation myth and start over again,” he told me. “The narrative is ‘we're going to redo the narrative of the United States by returning to origins, to marksmanship.' People are focusing on the idea that America's problems can be resolved into something that can be shot. It doesn't exactly encourage systematic reflection, but it's a long ways from a civil war.”

The National Rifle Association declined to address the question of where Appleseed fits into the gun culture. “We are familiar with who they are and what they do,” a spokesman, Andrew Arulanandam, told me. “But given that we don't have firsthand experience, we are reticent to say anything beyond that.” Maynard Reid Jr., the sheriff of Randolph County in North Carolina, which includes the Ramseur range, told me he hadn't heard of the Appleseed Project, though he sometimes rents the range from Dailey for sniper training. “Jack Dailey is a straightforward guy,” he told me. “He don't try to sugarcoat things. He's a good man, as far as I know.”

Appleseed's claim to mainstream legitimacy is bolstered by the group's ties to active-duty members of the military. In March, an instructor who works as a researcher at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico arranged for Appleseed to conduct five days of training with a brigade from the Second Engineer Battalion. Appleseed also gave free on-base training to a unit from the South Carolina National Guard. I shot at Appleseed boot camps alongside Marines looking to hone their skills before deployment. They came to Appleseed out of uniform, on their own accord. The final two days of the Ramseur boot camp were led by 26-year-old John Hawes, who won a Silver Star in Afghanistan and recently taught marksmanship to soldiers at Fort Jackson. “The Army's gotten away from the basics,” he told me.

On one of the final afternoons of boot camp, Gordon Wade, a math professor at Bowling Green State University, was cooking outside his tent. Dailey lumbered up and told Wade he had the makings of a good instructor. Wade said he wasn't sure how many of his academic peers he could bring into the Appleseed fold. “They might think it's some kind of militia,” he said.

The men stood in silence. Wade stirred his dinner. “A man should have a rifle,” he said. “Not just a .22. A man should have an AR-15 the same way he should have one good suit. Now, I can't really think of a scenario where I'm going to use my AR-15 as an AR-15. I can't quite articulate it. It sounds like I want to go out fighting zombies” — slang for the unprepared — “or feds. I don't want to. But if it ever comes to that, God forbid, I want to be able to. But no, no. . . .” He shook his head. “That isn't it either. It's just something that I think I should have. Fred, why should I have an AR-15?”

Dailey stood with his arms crossed. He said: “Because they want to tell us what to do. And we don't want them to tell us what to do.”

Dailey keeps his rifle stocks in an old Coca-Cola warehouse filled to the rafters with the remainders of war — empty bandoleers, rifle slings, rifle butt plates, rifle brushes, rifle grease. Thousands of wooden stocks stripped of their actions lay in jumbled piles. Dailey fired his first gun at age 6, a .22 aimed at a tree stump. He pulled the trigger; his father held the stock. His first rifle was a Japanese Model 99, a present from his mother for his 19th birthday. The physical fact of the gun led him to consider what action it might have seen. “The joy of owning these things is tough to explain,” he says. “Either you feel it or you don't.” In the Army R.O.T.C. at North Carolina State University , he learned to fire and strip an M1 Garand. Academic deferments kept him out of Vietnam. In 1969, he took a bus to Washington to march against the war. “I thought this was a serious thing,” he says. “Everyone else was there to party.” He gave up his activist stirrings for law school, married, graduated and began rehabbing apartment buildings in Chicago. He did well enough to retire at 42, but the experience eroded his idealism. “A landlord is like a cop or a bartender,” he says. “You get to see people as they really are.” His politics moved toward “the iron rule of life: everyone wants to be first in line to eat and last in line to die.” The economic malaise of the late 1970s seemed to confirm this pessimism. He sought comfort in survivalist magazines and stockpiled rifles and canned food. In the mid-1980s, he sold off his properties and moved with his wife back to North Carolina.

Dailey's frustration with the government peaked during the 1990s after the fatal conflicts at Ruby Ridge and Waco. “Uncle Sam told 76 Americans to come out of their own house, lay down their arms and spread-eagle on the ground,” he says of Waco. “Does that sound to you like the sovereignty of the individual?” At that time, growing restive, he bought more than half a million pounds of rifle stocks at an army-surplus auction. He named his new venture “Fred's,” after his dog, and wrote indictments of the Clintons and the “New World Order” that reached 94,000 readers. As the radical right gathered steam in the '90s, Dailey's anger fixated on the United Nations , which he saw as a metagovernment bent on covertly undermining American sovereignty. He organized a “U.N. Day” shoot at a local gun club, painting targets United Nations blue and firing holes through a steel U.N. helmet. In 2002, Dailey wrote “Battlin' the U.N.,” a near-future story of six riflemen who ambush a U.N. convoy rolling through Iowa. Using the accompanying targets, Dailey's readers could practice shooting Boris, the villainous U.N. commander.

Dailey calls all this “my young and stupid years.” The Appleseed Project appeals to a broad constituency, one whose edges blur into the N.R.A. at one end and into violent militias like the Hutaree , nine of whose members were indicted in March for conspiracy to murder, at the other end. Notices of Appleseed shoots appear regularly on militia Web sites. Dailey argues that outreach like this attracts radical anger and then moderates it. Many Appleseeders have stories like that of Rod Jackson, a former bouncer whom I met at a shoot in Fresno, Calif. After leaving the Navy, Jackson spent years as a homeless alcoholic but now works by day as a telecommunications technician and by night at a gun range. He has long been preparing for an event he read about online — Teotwawki, which stands for “the end of the world as we know it.” He stored up enough food to feed his family for 30 days and planned to relocate to a remote valley. “I was going to hide myself in a hole,” he said. “Then Fred made this comment that people who build caves are cowards. That stung.”

As his involvement with Appleseed deepened, Jackson found his focus shifting to what he could accomplish within the present system. “A lot of folks in the gun community talk about stepping up and fighting,” he said. “That's skipping over the easy stuff for the hard stuff. The point is that we don't need to fight now. We have another option.” That option, he said, was contacting elected representatives.

In a cramped room adjoining the warehouse, Dailey monitors the message board and plows through queries from instructors. In a recent post he acknowledged that though he once “flirted with the dark side,” there was no place for the rhetoric of deterrence within Appleseed. Statements like “we'll soon be in a future when the shooting starts,” he wrote, are not compatible with Appleseed's mission.

During my travels through Appleseed country, I spoke with nearly 100 cooks and riflemen and corresponded with dozens more. None seemed as close to the dark side as James Faire of Monroe, Wash., a man obsessed with reducing the space between readiness and action to the thinnest possible line. After years of practice Faire has whittled that space down to the fraction of a second that it takes him to open the snap holster on his belt, draw and level the Kimber 1911 he carries whenever outside the house, apply pressure to the hair trigger and fire a hollow-point .460-caliber round into his target, all while backpedaling at a 45-degree angle. “This is called moving off the X,” he told me. “By the time you draw on them and say, ‘Drop the weapon,' you're already dead.”

Faire has practiced this maneuver thousands of times. He says he came close to using it last year while trying to clear a downed tree from the road leading to his five-acre homestead in Monroe. A sheriff's deputy drove up, lights flashing, with his own ideas about how best to clear the tree. Words were exchanged. The hands of both men drifted down toward their holsters. The way Faire tells it, the peace of Snohomish County momentarily teetered. Then the deputy got back in his car and drove away.

Deputies, Faire says, are criminals operating “under the color of law.” He refuses to vote, and the signature on his driver's license appears with the disclaimer “all rights reserved.” Some of Faire's views resemble those of the sovereign-citizen movement, extremists who deny the legitimacy of federal law. Faire heard about Appleseed through a Web site he administers called A Well Regulated Militia. Last year he began hosting monthly Appleseed shoots on his land, which appeared on Appleseed's print and online schedules. In 2008, a government informant reportedly observed Andrew Steven Gray shooting an AR-15-style rifle and a pistol on Faire's range. Gray, a 33-year-old convicted felon, is legally barred from owning any firearms. In Gray's storage locker, according to a government complaint, federal agents found a cache of 21 guns, four silencers, two bulletproof vests and 9,000 rounds of ammunition. At his home nearby, says the complaint, were several hundred marijuana plants. Last month Gray was sentenced to four years in prison on gun and drug charges.

The complaint against Gray states that Faire's range is known as the Militia Training Center, which “routinely holds training for individuals involved with the militia movement.” When I brought all this up to Dailey, he said Faire was “wrapping himself in the flag of Appleseed” to manage his troubles with the county, which closed his range for code violations. I asked Faire whether Dailey had given him any flack. “Privately, they've been very supportive,” he said. Though Faire says he obeyed Appleseed's prohibition against talking politics during his shoots, he can still be seen explaining Appleseed's basics on YouTube and accusing President Obama of “telling people to shut up and not talk.”

Shortly after the arrests in March of nine people thought to be members of the Hutaree militia, I e-mailed Faire and asked whether he had any contact with the group. He replied that he trained with one of the accused Hutaree in 2005, “although he showed mental instability and further association was discouraged.” Faire says the charges were “made up of whole cloth. They had the motive and means and opportunity to resist their arrest but did not. If they were guilty, they would have resisted.”

On an overcast winter day in Monroe, Faire and I sat beside a wood stove in a classroom a few steps away from his house. Targets of kaffiyeh-clad figures armed with rocket-propelled grenades leaned against the wall. I sipped coffee as Faire split wood and unfurled his politics. “The government has quite literally become tyrannical,” he said. “It is fulfilling the principles outlined in ‘The Communist Manifesto.' ” His seemed to have a deep urge to see himself as a revolutionary, and it was hard to imagine him at a loss for a framework that would let him do so.

“It's completely out of control,” he continued, “from city to state to federal to international law. All predicate their existence on plundering the individual and his rights. The only thing to do now is to organize citizens into a militia to abolish this government. They're the supreme law of the land, the only ones who have the moral and legal authority to do it.” His voice was calm. It was as if he knew these things were true to both of us.

Faire, who is 50, has a neat mustache and moves with a martial steadiness. He often grips his belt with his right hand during conversation. It holds the holster of his 1911, the muzzle of which peeks out from beneath the waist of his black tactical jacket. The police, he said, often mistake him for an off-duty officer. He gave me a tour of his land, pointing out a ruined minivan used for sniper practice. Somewhere in the surrounding hills he once buried waterproof tubes containing clothes, provisions and six M1 Garands; he later dug them up and sold them to pay for his legal battle with the county over the code violations.

After lunch in the nearby city of Gold Bar, we returned to Monroe for a meeting at a diner with two friends that Faire met while working on the Ron Paul presidential campaign. One talked of establishing a camp where like-minded dissidents might be trained in the use of arms. The man asked for Faire's help. Faire seemed reluctant to commit. The man said, “I told my wife 30 years ago, ‘I'm tired of being an insignificant man living in a broken culture.' ” And yet here he was three decades later, still looking for his first recruit. Did he really want to be dangerous?

When American men talk like this, they are usually giving voice to fantasy. Only in fantasy, after all, are governments overthrown by men trained to do nothing more than shoot long-distance targets in a controlled environment. Some of these men seek out unlikely battlefields, where they can be warriors of the future, warriors of the imagination or reluctant warriors in waiting who are passing their time on the Internet. The power of a gun to take a life is not so much a threat as a talisman connecting these fantasies to the real world.

“When I hold a rifle in my hands, I can feel the choice that I'm making,” one Appleseeder, a computer programmer from Southern California, told me. “I know what I can do with this gun, but I also know I'm not going to do that. I have become death. When you have that power and that choice, you know what choice you're going to make. When someone can be death over a quarter mile, that's a tremendous responsibility.”

The exceptions to the rule of the responsible gun owner generate headlines and casualties. The largest threat that Appleseed poses is the possibility that some future gunmen will find their way from some dark-side message board to an Appleseed boot camp. “There's always going to be someone who thinks the revolution is sooner rather than later,” Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center says. “Now they're learning to be snipers. You would hope Appleseed would do some screening.”

When I asked Dailey about this, he said, “If we recruited 500 people from one of these crazy boards and 499 of them wound up agreeing with us, then what would you say?”

“I would want to know about the one who didn't agree,” I said. “You've taught him how to kill with a rifle out to 500 yards.”

“Well, the only precaution for that is not to teach the skills at all. Why even let them have the hardware, in that case?” He proposed an analogy. “What if the inmates in the asylum were stabbing each other with knives? Do you give them plastic spoons? Or do you cure the insanity?”

“But part of what you're doing is sharpening the knives.”

“If we can cure the insanity, I think it's a fair trade.”

On my last day in North Carolina, Dailey and I visited a Revolutionary War battlefield an hour's drive from the warehouse. We walked through the wooded site as joggers and couples passed us on the trail. We came to a stop at two cannon replicas beside what had once been colonial lines. Dailey paraphrased what he called “the gay quote,” John Adams's sentiment that he would study war, so his sons could study business and agriculture, so their sons could study the arts. “What a bad plan!” Dailey said. “The bad people of the world are still going to be there in three generations. So your grandson better know something about war. You can't just have the third generation sitting around, ballet dancing, playing pianos and talking dilettante talk.”

I asked whether Appleseed was really about the decline of the American man. Dailey vehemently disagreed. To prove me wrong he stopped two young women, introduced himself and began to pitch the program. Wearing sandals and modish sunglasses, they appeared to be the sort of prospective Appleseeders who could buttress the program against the dark side.

“Pop quiz,” Dailey said. “When was the American Revolution won?”

“Yorktown is considered the final victory,” one of the women, Melissa Hogg, said. She majored in history at the University of Virginia , she said, specializing in the Revolutionary War.

“Would you believe what a founder said?” Dailey asked. “It was won before the first shot was fired, in the hearts and minds of the American people.”

“Of course,” Hogg said. “It's a matter of ideology.”

Dailey seemed to bristle at this, hearing in Hogg's words a disbelief in the specialness of American hearts and minds — and the suggestion that the motives behind the American Revolution were no better or worse than those of any other. Nevertheless, he gave the women Appleseed's Web address.

As we made our way back to the parking lot, he shook his head. “You see what we're up against?” he asked. “Imagine 300 million of those.”

A call to arms Online video of an Appleseed Project target practice in Iowa can be seen at: nytimes.com/magazine

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/magazine/01Appleseed-t.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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In Colorado, Debate Over Program to Check Immigration History of the Arrested

By DAN FROSCH

DENVER — In September 2008, a Guatemalan immigrant named Francis Hernandez sped his S.U.V. through a busy Aurora intersection and plowed into a pickup truck, knocking it into an ice cream parlor.

Three people were killed, including a 3-year-old boy.

Mr. Hernandez, as it turned out, was in the country illegally and been arrested more than a dozen times over the years, but had managed to elude deportation.

A task force recommended that Colorado institute a federal background check program called Secure Communities, which helps the authorities check an arrested person’s immigration history through a government database, for possible deportation.

Now, as Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. weighs whether to use Secure Communities, already in effect in 480 jurisdictions in 27 states, immigrant rights groups have been privately pushing him to reject the program. Critics say it promotes racial profiling by the local police and would undermine trust between immigrants and law enforcement, in a state that has particularly strict immigration laws.

“Secure Communities is an overbroad dragnet that will end up destroying communities and families while driving victims and witnesses underground,” said Hans Meyer, policy coordinator for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition.

But officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the federal agency that runs Secure Communities, says the program is shoring up a system that has allowed illegal immigrants with criminal records to escape notice.

“It allows ICE and local law enforcement agencies to know as much as possible about people in local custody without any additional costs or procedural changes by local officers,” said Richard Rocha, deputy press secretary for the agency.

Under Secure Communities, created in 2008, people arrested have their fingerprints run through an immigration database, a process that takes only a few hours and is swifter and more efficient than the old method of local law enforcement making referrals to ICE. If they have had prior contact with immigration authorities — like having been previously deported, having been detained or having applied for a work visa — their names will appear in the database and the authorities can place an immigration hold on them.

Congress has allotted $550 million to pay for the program so far, and Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, said she wants it available to every law enforcement agency by 2013.

Nearly three million people have been screened since the program’s debut in Harris County, Texas, in October 2008, through June of this year.

Of those, 39,054 were identified as having committed violent crimes like rape, murder and assault, and 9,831 have been deported. Of an additional 223,752 people who had committed less serious offenses, ranging from property crimes to misdemeanors, 24,805 were deported.

Mr. Rocha says the priority is finding violent criminal illegal immigrants. But critics say that most illegal immigrants identified by Secure Communities have committed low-level offenses and that the program is like an immigration sweep.

Bridget Kessler, a teaching fellow at Benjamin N. Cardozo law school at Yeshiva University in New York said the Obama administration was acting hypocritically by pushing for Secure Communities.

“It seems that the administration is speaking out of both sides of its mouth: standing strong to condemn state-imposed ICE and local partnerships in the context of Arizona, and quietly but forcefully, and on a much larger scale, promoting similar state-imposed ICE and local partnerships nationwide,” Ms. Kessler said.

Cheryl Little, executive director for the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami, said: “ICE claims, as it has done for years, that it is targeting dangerous criminals. Yet the program screens the fingerprints of anyone arrested by local police, not just those convicted of crimes.”

Florida is one of three states that have carried out the program statewide (Virginia and Delaware are the others).

Lt. Michael Lindsay, with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, said the program was effectively ferreting out illegal immigrants. “You’re being deported for being in the country illegally,” Lieutenant Lindsay said. “The crimes bring them to our attention. And the more heinous the crimes just gets them a front seat.”

Opinion on Secure Communities is divided among law enforcement in Colorado.

Keith Ikeda, the police chief of Basalt, a small mountain town with a sizable Hispanic population, said, “If we start talking about misdemeanor arrests and traffic infractions, then I believe it erodes the public trust.”

But Lance Clem, a spokesman for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which supports the program, predicted it would discourage racial profiling because everyone is subject to the same background check.

There is also the issue of the program accidentally ensnaring victims of crimes, particularly domestic violence, where the perpetrator can be unclear.

Domestic violence and immigrant rights’ advocates in Colorado have said that those arrested for domestic violence should not be subject to a Secure Communities screening until they are convicted, and that the program should exempt victims of crimes.

Mr. Ritter, a Democrat who is not seeking a second term, has not indicated whether he will sign on for the program.

Lost in the debate over the issue is the fact that Secure Communities would not have identified Mr. Hernandez, who was sentenced to 60 years in prison for vehicular homicide, had it been operating at the time, according to ICE.

Because Mr. Hernandez came into the country as a child and used multiple aliases to avoid deportation, ICE said, he was never referred to immigration officials despite his many arrests.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/us/30colorado.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Nuclear Forensics Skill Is Declining in U.S., Report Says

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

The nation's ability to identify the source of a nuclear weapon used in a terrorist attack is fragile and eroding, according to a report released Thursday by the National Research Council .

Such highly specialized detective work, known as nuclear attribution, seeks to study clues from fallout and radioactive debris as a way to throw light on the identity of the attacker and the maker of the weapon. In recent years, federal officials have sought to improve such analytic skills, arguing that nuclear terrorism is a grave, long-term threat to the nation.

The major goals of the federal efforts are to clarify options for retaliation and to deter terrorists by letting them know that nuclear devices have fingerprints that atomic specialists can find and trace.

The report, “Nuclear Forensics: A Capability at Risk,” was made public by the National Research Council , the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences . It summarizes a secret version completed in January. Three federal agencies — the Department of Homeland Security , the Defense Department, and the National Nuclear Security Administration , which is part of the Energy Department — requested the study.

The public report says that a series of factors threaten to undermine the nation's ability to conduct nuclear investigations intended to learn the provenance of an explosive device, whether it is a true atomic weapon or a so-called dirty bomb that uses conventional explosives to spew radioactivity.

“Although U.S. nuclear forensics capabilities are substantial and can be improved, right now they are fragile, underresourced and, in some respects, deteriorating,” the report warns. “Without strong leadership, careful planning and additional funds, these capabilities will decline.”

Much of the forensic expertise is in the laboratories that maintain the nation's nuclear arsenal. They had their heyday during the cold war and are now struggling to attract personnel, finance projects and carve out new identities.

The study was done by a dozen nuclear specialists from academia, industry, the military and the nuclear laboratories, including Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory . It was led by Albert Carnesale, a nuclear engineer and chancellor emeritus of the University of California, Los Angeles , who during the cold war represented the United States in atomic negotiations.

The panel sharply criticized the federal government’s management of the forensic endeavor, saying several agencies shared responsibility for investigations but did so “without central authority and with no consensus on strategic requirements to guide the program.” The organizational complexity, the panel said, “hampers the program and could prove to be a major hindrance operationally.”

In addition, the panel cited a lack of skilled personnel, the use of outdated instruments and the existence of old facilities in need of upgrading. For general support, the forensics work depends on the nation’s program for maintaining its nuclear arsenal, the report noted, adding, however, that its “funds are declining.”

The report calls on the federal government to take steps to strengthen its forensic capabilities. It argues for the necessity of better planning, more robust budgets, clearer lines of authority and more realistic exercises.

In a preface to the report, Dr. Carnesale noted that the federal government had worked hard to improve the situation since the classified version of the report was issued in January, and that it had appeared to make progress.

“Much work,” he added, “remains to be done.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/us/30nuke.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Voting Behind Bars

By LINDA GREENHOUSE

Another public conversation about race may be the last thing the Obama administration wants, but thanks to the Supreme Court, one is very likely on the way.

It has been nearly three months since the court “invited” — that is to say, ordered — Solicitor General Elena Kagan to “express the views of the United States” on whether laws that take away the right to vote from people in prison or on parole can be challenged under the Voting Rights Act as racially discriminatory.

The order came in a case from Massachusetts, Simmons v. Galvin, an appeal by prison inmates challenging a 10-year-old state constitutional amendment that stripped them of the right to vote while incarcerated. They seek Supreme Court review of a ruling, issued a year ago by the federal appeals court in Boston, that Congress never intended the Voting Rights Act to apply in prison. The federal government was not involved in the case. Now the administration — presumably under the direction of whomever President Obama names to succeed Ms. Kagan as solicitor general — has to come up with a position.

Given the implications of the case, the Supreme Court's order has received surprisingly little attention. Forty-eight states, all except Maine and Vermont, deny convicted felons the right to vote, a modern version of the old concept of “civil death” for those convicted of serious crimes. In some states, as in Massachusetts, the ban lasts for the duration of the prison sentence. More often, it extends for years longer, through the parole period, as in New York, where in 2006 the federal appeals court rejected a challenge over the dissent of four judges, including Sonia Sotomayor.

The issue of felon disenfranchisement turns the spotlight on some uncomfortable facts about who goes to prison in the United States, a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world.

In every state, the impact on the black community is disproportionate, hardly surprising given that one in nine black men aged 20 to 34 is in prison. Even so, the numbers are startling, with disturbing implications for civic life in a democracy. According to an analysis by the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy organization in Washington, felony convictions have deprived 20 percent of African-Americans in Virginia of the right to vote, compared with a 6.8 percent disenfranchisement rate for Virginia residents as a whole. In Texas, a similar ratio applies: 9.3 percent for blacks compared with 3.3 percent for Texans as a whole. In New York, 80 percent of those who have lost the right to vote are black or Hispanic. Nationally, an estimated one in seven black men has lost the right to vote.

So clearly, the issue of felon disenfranchisement turns the spotlight on some uncomfortable facts about who goes to prison in the United States, a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. More than two million people, nearly half of them black, are behind bars, including many whose felony convictions are the result of relatively minor drug offenses.

(The House of Representatives took a step this week toward addressing one aspect of the problem by passing the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. The bill, which President Obama is expected to sign, eliminates the five-year mandatory minimum sentence for the simple possession of crack cocaine and moves toward equalizing the amounts of cocaine in crack and powder form that provoke the same sentences; the previous ratio of 1 to 100 — five grams of crack counting the same as 500 grams of powder — will now be 1 to 18. But the bill does not make any of its provisions retroactive.)

Some scholars of race and criminal justice have warned that the mass incarceration of African-Americans is “The New Jim Crow,” the title of a new book by Michelle Alexander, a professor at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law. “We have allowed ourselves to be willfully blind to the emergence of a new caste system,” Professor Alexander writes, “a system of social excommunication that has denied millions of African Americans basic human dignity.”

This is where the Voting Rights Act claim enters the picture. Section 2 of the law bars any “voting qualification” that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” (The operative word here is “results”; Congress made clear in a 1982 amendment that Voting Rights Act does not require proof of intentional discrimination.) The civil rights organizations that have filed suits around the country argue that the racially disparate impact of the disenfranchisement laws fits clearly within the Section 2 definition of a Voting Rights Act violation as a matter of the plain meaning of the statute’s text, regardless of what a judge might deduce about Congressional intent or lack thereof.

This was Sonia Sotomayor’s point in her dissenting opinion in the New York federal district court case four years ago. The issue was not complicated, she wrote: “It is plain to anyone reading the Voting Rights Act that it applies to all ‘voting qualifications.’ ” And it was “equally plain” that the New York law “disqualifies a group of people from voting.” Consequently, she continued:

“These two propositions should constitute the entirety of our analysis. Section 2 of the Act by its unambiguous terms subjects felony disenfranchisement and all other voting qualifications to its coverage.”

Judge Sotomayor concluded her one-page opinion with a paragraph that foreshadowed remarks she would make three years later, at her Supreme Court confirmation hearing. “The duty of a judge is to follow the law, not to question its plain terms,” she said, adding that “if Congress had doubts about the wisdom of subjecting felony disenfranchisement laws to the results test of Section 2, I trust that Congress would prefer to make any needed changes itself, rather than have courts do so for it.”

Her opinion did not go unobserved at the time of her nomination to the Supreme Court. “Sonia Sotomayor wants to give jailbirds the right to vote,” the conservative Washington Times wrote in an editorial in May 2009. The newspaper said that her “remarkably dismissive” opinion should “make senators extremely wary of confirming her.”

It is impossible to know from the outside whether the Supreme Court’s “invitation” to the solicitor general was the result of Justice Sotomayor’s internal advocacy, but clearly the issue has the court’s attention. It takes the votes of four justices to “call for the views of the solicitor general” (“CVSG” in Supreme Court jargon). And it takes four votes for the court to accept a case for decision.

The court’s preliminary expression of interest is no guarantee that the justices will eventually decide to hear the Massachusetts case. In late September, the federal appeals court in San Francisco will rehear a case challenging Washington State’s felon disenfranchisement law. A panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, splitting 2-1, ruled in January that the law violated the Voting Rights Act in light of “compelling” evidence of racial discrimination in the state’s criminal justice system. (African-Americans make up 3.4 percent of Washington’s population but 23 percent of its prison inmates.) But the full appeals court then vacated the panel’s opinion and ordered the case reheard by an expanded panel of 11 judges. The Washington case, now called Farrakhan v. Gregoire, has been traveling up and down the federal court system since the mid-1990’s and has accumulated a huge record. The justices may prefer to wait to see what the Ninth Circuit does with it.

Whatever the justices eventually decide to do, the Obama administration is on the hook right now, obliged to respond to the May 3 CVSG. There is no formal deadline, but the court’s general expectation is that the solicitor general will take no more than a few months to convey the government’s views when asked. The right-wing critique of Justice Sotomayor’s 2006 opinion, as well as the continued popularity of the disenfranchisement laws — in blue-state Massachusetts, the voting ban was added to the state Constitution by referendum a decade ago when voters approved it by a margin of nearly two to one — demonstrates how politically potent the issue is.

But while the justices have handed the administration a burden, they have also provided an opportunity, as the court’s agenda-setting process occasionally does by prompting other government institutions to confront issues that might more easily go unaddressed. It is an opportunity for public education, for engagement with a painful issue, for leadership.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/voting-behind-bars/?pagemode=print

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From the White House

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Remarks by the President Before Signing the Tribal Law and Order Act

East Room

4:58 P.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, everybody. Please have a seat.

I want to start, obviously, by thanking Lisa for her introduction and having the courage to share her story with all of us today. It’s for every survivor like Lisa who has never gotten their day in court, and for every family that feels like justice is beyond reach, and for every tribal community struggling to keep its people safe, that I’ll be signing the Tribal Law and Order Act into law today.

And in doing so, I intend to send a clear message that all of our people -- whether they live in our biggest cities or our most remote reservations -- have the right to feel safe in their own communities, and to raise their children in peace, and enjoy the fullest protection of our laws.

As many of you know, I campaigned on this issue. And during our last -- during our tribal conference last year, I pledged my administration’s fullest support for this bill. And I told Senator Dorgan last week that I intended to sign it in a ceremony here at the White House with all of you. So today, I am proud to make good on my word.

Now, I’m told there’s a Seneca proverb that says “He who would do great things should not attempt them all alone.” (Laughter.) And that’s particularly true of this legislation, which is the product of tireless efforts by countless individuals across this country. Congressional leaders like Senator Dorgan, Representative Herseth Sandlin, and others who are here today, and tribal leaders like Chairman Marcus Levings, President Theresa Two Bulls, President Diane Enos, Chief Chad Smith, Vice Chairman Jonathan Windy Boy -- we are grateful to all of them for their extraordinary support. And then we’ve got leaders in our administration like Attorney General Holder and Secretary Salazar, Kimberly Teehee, Jodi Gillette here at the White House who work tirelessly on this legislation.

And that’s nothing to say of all the dedicated judges and prosecutors and tribal and BIA law enforcement officers -- some of whom are here today -- who’ve supported these efforts. And the determined survivors most of all, like Lisa, who even when it’s too late to undo what happened to them, still speak out to seek justice for others.

All of you come at this from different angles, but you’re united in support of this bill because you believe, like I do, that it is unconscionable that crime rates in Indian Country are more than twice the national average and up to 20 times the national average on some reservations. And all of you believe, like I do, that when one in three Native American women will be raped in their lifetimes, that is an assault on our national conscience; it is an affront to our shared humanity; it is something that we cannot allow to continue.

So ultimately, it’s not just the federal government’s relationship with tribal governments that compels us to act, it’s not just our obligations under treaty and under law, but it’s also our values as a nation that are at stake. And that’s why earlier this year, after extensive consultations with tribal leaders, Attorney General Holder announced significant reforms to increase prosecutions of crimes committed in Indian Country. He hired more Assistant U.S. Attorneys and more victim-witness specialists. And he even created a position for a National Indian Country Training Coordinator who will work with prosecutors and law enforcement officers throughout Indian Country.

And under Secretary Salazar’s leadership, we’re launching new community policing pilot programs. We’ve overhauled the recruitment process for BIA officers, resulting in a 500 percent jump in applications and the largest hiring increase in history. And we’re working to deploy those officers to the field as quickly as possible.

The bill I’m signing into law today will build on these efforts, because it requires the Justice Department to disclose data on cases in Indian Country that it declines to prosecute and it gives tribes greater authority to prosecute and punish criminals themselves. It expands recruitment and retention and training for BIA and Tribal officers and gives them better access to criminal databases. It includes new provisions to prevent counterfeiting of Indian-produced crafts and new guidelines and training for domestic violence and sex crimes. And it strengthens tribal courts and police departments and enhances programs to combat drug and alcohol abuse and help at-risk youth.

So these are significant measures that will empower tribal nations and make a real difference in people’s lives. Because as I said during our tribal conference, I have no interest in just paying lip service to the problems we face. I know that too often, this community has heard grand promises from Washington that turned out to be little more than empty words. And I pledged to you then that if you gave me a chance, this time it would be different. I told you I was committed to moving forward and forging a new and better future together in every aspect of our government-to-government relationship.

And slowly but surely, that is exactly what we are doing. At this moment, agencies across our government are implementing detailed plans to increase coordination and consultation with tribal governments -- and I intend to hold them accountable for following through.

We’ve also included a permanent reauthorization of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act in the health care reform legislation we passed this spring. We’re strengthening Tribal education. We’re working to spur economic development throughout Indian Country. And in consultation with Indian tribes, we’re now formally reviewing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. And after 14 long years, we’ve finally settled the Cobell case and we’re working with Congress to get the settlement approved as quickly as possible.

So we’re moving forward, and we’re making progress. And as we celebrate today, I’m reminded of a visit I made a couple of years ago to the Crow Nation out in Montana. While I was there, I was adopted into the Nation by a wonderful couple -- Hartford and Mary Black Eagle -- so I’m Barack Black Eagle. (Laughter.) But I was also -- I was also given a Crow name that means “One Who Helps People Throughout the Land.” And it’s a name that I view not as an honor that I deserve, but as a responsibility that I must work to fulfill.

And looking back, I can’t help but think that only in America could a guy like me named Barack Obama -- adoptive son of the Crow Nation -- go on to become President. (Laughter and applause.) That was improbable when it happened two years ago -- (laughter) -- but it would have been inconceivable a generation or two before that. And I think the same could be said of this legislation.

And that should ultimately give us all hope. It should remind us that our union has a way of -- over time -- becoming more, and not less, perfect -- more inclusive, more fair, more free. And that’s because of people like you -- leaders and public servants and everyday folks who understand that we’re more than just heirs to a difficult past. Here in America, we have a chance to choose a different future, and to heed those better angels of our nature and cast our lot with something bigger than ourselves.

So it’s in that spirit that I hope we define the relationship between our nations in the years ahead, and it is the goal of this legislation that I am proud to sign into law today.

Thank you very much, everybody. God bless you. God bless the United States of America. (Applause.)

(The bill is signed.)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-signing-tribal-law-and-order-act

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From ICE

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ICE -- a proven track record as the prevailing agency investigating human rights violations

Over the past century, the world has seen an endless string of violent conflicts resulting in the death, mutilation, rape, disappearance and displacement of millions of innocent men, women and children. The victims of these conflicts are often persecuted based on race, religion, ethnic background or political ideologies. Although some perpetrators are arrested and held accountable in the countries in which their crimes were committed, many are not. Instead, human rights violators routinely evade prosecution and punishment for their actions. Escaping from their home countries, they assume new identities and exploit the immigration laws of nations who welcome refugees. They blend into their new societies, hide amongst their victims, and live with impunity in our communities.

ICE's Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) is the largest investigative wing of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). HSI is responsible for ensuring that perpetrators of war crimes, genocide, torture and other gross human rights abuses do not evade justice and accountability for their crimes by hiding in the United States. Over the past several years, ICE/ HSI has repeatedly demonstrated the agency's unique ability to identify, investigate, prosecute and remove some of the world's most brutal human rights violators and notorious war criminals.

The agency's efforts in this arena are spearheaded by the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Unit (HRVWCU), a specialized unit of highly dedicated, skilled agents, intelligence officers, analysts, criminal research specialists, historians, and prosecutors. Based in Washington, D.C., the HRVWCU coordinates and oversees the two primary missions of the investigative program:

ICE's unique set of federal authorities stems from its role as the primary U.S. federal law enforcement agency charged with investigating the illicit movement of people, goods and money across U.S. borders. ICE uses these authorities to investigate violations of federal criminal law including customs and immigration offenses, as well as violations of law under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). As a result, ICE has one of the most wide-ranging sets of investigative authorities amongst U.S. federal law enforcement agencies. These various authorities have proven to be an invaluable asset when investigating human rights violators. Since ICE launched its No Safe Haven Initiative in 2004, ICE led-investigations have resulted in the arrests of approximately 200 suspected human rights violators. Criminal violations include visa/passport fraud, false statements, perjury and torture resulting in sentences ranging from six months to 97 years in U.S. federal prison.

A recent example of the use of ICE's various legal authorities is evident in the case of Chuckie Taylor, an American citizen and the son of former Liberian president Charles Taylor. During the course of a multi-year investigation into American citizens involved in arms trafficking to West Africa, a violation of U.S. arms export control laws, ICE agents learned that Chuckie Taylor planned to travel to the U.S. In March 2006, ICE agents arrested Taylor for making a false statement on his U.S. passport application. This arrest was the result of an international investigation, initiated and led by ICE, that included the assistance of the FBI and the Department of Justice. Based on the investigation, the U.S. Attorney's Office charged Chuckie Taylor with five counts of torture, conspiracy to torture and two federal firearm offenses for his role in the torture and murder of several victims in Liberia during his father's regime. Taylor was convicted of all counts and was sentenced to 97 years in federal prison. What began as an investigation using ICE's authorities ultimately resulted in the first use of the federal torture statute since its enactment in 1994.

In addition to its criminal authorities, ICE uses its administrative authority under the INA to investigate and prosecute human rights abusers. ICE uses administrative charges such as genocide, torture or extrajudicial killing to hold human rights violators accountable even if there are no viable criminal charges. In many instances, administrative charges are used to ensure a suspected human rights violator's return to face charges in his or her home country. Since 2004, ICE has successfully removed over 300 known or suspected human rights abusers from the United States.

Under the agency's Human Rights Target Tracking Initiative, ICE's agents, criminal research specialists, and intelligence officers work with their domestic and international counterparts to identify serious foreign human rights abusers and to prevent them from seeking safe haven in the U.S. Since formally undertaking this initiative in June 2008, ICE has been instrumental in preventing the successful admission of over 40 human rights violators or war crimes suspects.

An instrumental part of ICE's investigations of human rights violators are the designated ICE agents assigned to field offices around the U.S. and to the ICE Attaché Offices around the globe. These agents travel around the world to identify and interview witnesses and gather evidence to support their investigations. They travel to countries and regions devastated by war, operating in difficult environments without running water, electricity or paved roads. They visit torture chambers, prison camps, military bases and other buildings where atrocities have been committed. In doing so, these agents put ICE in a position to present evidence to prosecutors to ensure perpetrators of human rights violations do not go unpunished for their actions.

The success of ICE agents in conducting investigations into human rights violators can probably be best highlighted by the cases they've worked, a small portion of which are summarized below:

ICE has made it a priority to use its authorities and expertise to deny human rights violators safe haven in the United States. By doing so, ICE has ensured that perpetrators of war crimes, torture, genocide and other atrocities are not given the opportunity to live among their victims, in our neighborhoods and within our borders, in relative obscurity. ICE has worked tirelessly to identify these violators, and in collaboration with other federal and international partners, to hold them accountable for the actions they committed.

Read more about successful ICE human rights violators cases.

http://www.ice.gov/pi/nr/1007/100729washingtondc.htm

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