Carolina Rubio Stol MacWright Opens Immigration Firm in Miami Beach, Florida

Carolina Rubio has opened a new immigration firm in Miami Beach, Florida.  The firm services clients all over South Florida, including in Homestead, Aventura, Everglades City, Coral Gables, Kendall, and South Miami.  More information on Rubio Immigration Law Firm, P.L.L.C. can be located at: http://www.rubiolawyer.com

Immigration concerns…

Some articles on Immigration that are worth the quixk read.

When I read these cases, I realize that I am not as paranoid as I think

I am…my concerns are justified when faced with examples like these…

STORY FROM THE ACLU CALI.

US CITIZEN WHO WAS ILLEGALLY DETAINED AND TWICE DEPORTED IS LATEST VICTIM OF GOVENMENT UNCONSITUTIIONAL IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT POLICY

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – A U.S. citizen who was illegally detained and twice deported to Mexico said immigration officials refused to believe his claim of citizenship, even when his mother traveled to the border to show Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents his birth certificate.

Guillermo Olivares of south Los Angeles was being held in a detention facility in San Diego earlier this month until an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California presented his birth certificate along with school and vaccination records to immigration authorities. Olivares was released later that same day.

“They didn’t believe me,” a frustrated Olivares said of his numerous encounters with immigration officials. “It seemed like there was nothing else I could do.”

Olivares’ mother, Eduvina Romero, echoed his story, explaining that she and her son repeatedly showed border immigration officials his birth certificate, to no avail. “They would never listen. It felt so unfair that they could simply disbelieve my son’s citizenship without giving us any chance to prove that what we said was true. It made me panicked and anxious,” she said. “I just wanted my son to be able to come home.”

Olivares is not the first U.S. citizen to be illegally deported. Pedro Guzman of Lancaster was deported to Mexico in 2007 and spent nearly three months lost in that country while family members desperately searched for him. In addition, Sens. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Robert Menendez of New Jersey recently sponsored the Protect Citizens and Residents from Unlawful Raids and Detention Act (S. 3594), to protect the rights of U.S. citizens and legal residents who get caught up in immigration raids.

Olivares was not picked up in such a raid, but the egregious violation of his rights as an American citizen dramatically demonstrates the same problem: that federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials routinely disregard the Constitution when enforcing federal immigration law.

“If ever there was evidence of the fundamental flaws in our immigration system, it is the fact that a U.S. citizen was deported twice and denied entry into the United States on numerous occasions without any due process of law,” said Jennie Pasquarella, staff attorney for the ACLU/SC. “ICE officials repeatedly ignored his certified birth certificate, which they could easily have corroborated, and instead simply refused to believe him. It is inconceivable that this would have happened were he not Latino.”

Olivares was born in the Los Angeles area, and had never lived outside the United States until he was forced to live in Mexico after ICE deported him in 2007 and refused to allow him to re-enter. But his ordeal began in 2000, when border agents questioned the veracity of his birth certificate and whether it belonged to him when he was returning into the United States at the Tijuana border crossing. The agents refused to let him enter his own country. A week later, however, Olivares’ mother met him at the border crossing with a certified copy of his birth certificate, and Olivares and his mother re-entered the United States without incident.

In 2007, while Olivares was serving time in state prison, agents from the Department of Homeland Security approached him and told him he was a Mexican citizen and would be deported. Olivares insisted that he was a U.S. citizen, but eventually – not fully understanding his rights as an American citizen – he was coerced into signing papers that were never explained to him and was deported to Mexico.

He then attempted to cross back into the United States, but border guards refused to let him enter. He felt he had no choice other than to live for a time with his mother’s family in Jalisco. But in June 2008, upon learning that his father in Los Angeles was gravely ill, Olivares again tried to cross the border legally, presenting a certified copy of his birth certificate. After being rebuffed, he crossed illegally, but was picked up by the U.S. Border Patrol. On September 2, 2008, he was deported for a second time to Mexico, on the day his father died.

In September, Olivares – accompanied by his mother — tried yet again to re-enter the United States legally from Tijuana. Once again, immigration officials rejected his birth certificate. However, this time he refused to sign his name to the papers foisted upon him and demanded to see a judge. As a result, ICE put Olivares in removal proceedings and detained him at the Otay Mesa Immigration Detention facility in San Diego. The family then contacted the Coalition for Human Immigrants’ Rights of Los Angeles, which in turn contacted the ACLU/SC. On October 9, ACLU/SC staff attorney Jennie Pasquarella advised ICE that it had no authority to detain Olivares because he was a U.S. citizen, and presented his birth certificate and other documentation demonstrating his citizenship. He was released later that day.

“There’s something fundamentally wrong with the system if border guards can effectively deprive you of your citizenship by simply disregarding a valid birth certificate,” said Pasquarella. “ICE officials obviously used race and ethnicity as a basis for enforcing our nation’s immigration laws, rather than taking a few minutes to verify Mr. Olivares’ legal status.”

A hearing in federal immigration court in Olivares’ case has been set for Jan. 6, 2009, at which Olivares will seek to terminate the removal proceedings against him.

Obama’s Immigration Conundrum

Saturday 07 February 2009

by: Bill Boyarsky, Truthdig

A child rests with her father at a US immigration detention center. (Photo: Jeff Topping / Reuters)

One of the worst messes facing the Obama administration is the disgraceful state of the federal government’s immigration detention centers.

There are 350 of these centers around the country, housing almost 30,000 men, women and even children waiting for the Department of Homeland Security to decide whether or not they will be deported. Some have been in custody for years. The centers are overcrowded. Newspapers and academic and civil liberties studies tell of physically and mentally ill inmates being denied help.

Given that they are in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security, you’d think these people would be suspected terrorists, threats to national security. Many, however, are guilty of nothing except seeking asylum from their native lands. Plenty have been swept up in the increasing number of raids by immigration officers. Some of these are actually here legally but are detained until they can prove it. Others have committed crimes, although some of the violations are so small they would have rated only a light fine or jail sentence in the criminal justice system.

As Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein wrote in The Washington Post last year, “Most are working-class men and women or indigent laborers who made mistakes that seem to pose no threat to national security….” The reporters counted 83 deaths in the last five years among those in detention centers and those who had just left them.

The American Civil Liberties Union, on a Web site devoted to the issue, said: “Within hours of their arrest, many immigrants caught up in raids are transferred to remote out-of-state detention centers and pressured into signing removal orders, often without being able to tell anyone where they are; as a result, family and lawyers have no time or ability to provide support and a legal defense. Inhumane and cruel conditions of confinement in the immigration detention centers are pervasive.”

University of Arizona researchers investigated three detention centers in that state, and in a report, “Unseen Children,” said mothers are separated from children in the immigration raids. The report also said the facilities did not provide enough care for the physically and mentally ill. It said inmates were denied chances to meet with lawyers or talk to relatives. And the researchers said noncriminal immigration women detainees were mixed with convicted criminals in some facilities.

Vincent Picard, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told me such mixing “is completely against our policy.” Inmates, he said, were permitted to make free phone calls to their countries’ consulates “and collect calls to anyone else.” Medical care is “excellent,” he said, provided by “an array of doctors, mental health professionals and staff.”

Recently, however, I met with Ahila Arulanantham and Marisol Orihueta, attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. They told me a different story. One of their clients, for example, is Diana Santander (full name: Oscar “Diana” Santander Leyva), a transgender person. The ACLU lawyers gave me copies of the court documents they’d filed on her behalf. Her story illustrates how immigrants can be unjustly locked up for long periods.

In her native Mexico, law enforcement officers treated her brutally because of her sexual status. On one occasion, they forced her to perform oral sex on officers, then burned her thighs with cigars. Another time, police officers attacked her with a knife, beat her with a gun butt and called her a “fucking faggot.”

Trying to escape the torture, Santander fled to the United States in 2004, entering illegally. In 2007, she was arrested and convicted of prostitution and trespassing and turned over to federal immigration authorities for deportation. Later, she learned that the brutality inflicted on her by the Mexican cops amounted to torture as defined in the United Nations Convention Against Torture. She applied for asylum.

Government attorneys objected, saying she had been jailed in Mexico more than eight years before on a robbery charge. The immigration judge sided with Santander, citing a lack of evidence that there had actually been a robbery. The judge granted her request for asylum. But that didn’t set her free. The government has appealed, and Santander remains in custody, where she has been for 21 months.

Whether the detention centers will be reformed is up to President Obama’s chief of the Department of Homeland Security, former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano. Her record makes you wonder just how far she’ll go.

As the popular Democratic governor of a conservative Republican state, Napolitano had to walk the line between anti-immigrant conservatives and Democrats (including Latinos) who opposed harsh measures. She signed a law imposing tough penalties on employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. She has also been allied with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the anti-immigrant sheriff of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, the state’s largest city. He became well known for making inmates wear pink underwear, housing them in tents and feeding them green-colored food. She got along well enough with the sheriff for him to endorse her for governor in her first race. This helped her win a narrow victory.

Once in her new Cabinet job, she said she intends to get “criminal aliens” off the streets. Presumably this means off the streets and into mandatory detention facilities, where they will await deportation hearings in the overcrowded centers.

To put them into detention, Napolitano can use laws that have greatly expanded the number of offenses for which mandatory detention is required. Previously, many immigrants were allowed to be free while awaiting their deportation hearings. Now they are just jailed. Diana Santander’s prostitution arrest would have earned her a night in county jail in the criminal justice system, not the months she has spent in jail under immigration jurisdiction.

Those who blame the recent Republican administration for the mess in the detention centers should be reminded that these laws were passed in 1996 and signed into law by President Clinton, who was desperately trying to court conservative voters after the Democratic congressional losses in 1994. The law doubled the number of immigrants in detention; the number grew swiftly after the Bush administration moved against immigrants after Sept. 11, 2001.

Don’t expect this mess to be cleaned up soon, especially with Secretary Napolitano sounding like a hard-liner. There is too much anti-immigrant sentiment. The detention centers were built with a bipartisan stamp of approval, with Democrats as well as Republicans supporting their expansion. Finally, given the poverty and low societal status of the inmates, few people will crusade on their behalf.

——–

This column was originally published on Truthdig (www.truthdig.com).

concerts!!!!!!!!!

Jan-

Andrew Bird-

6  friday in Orlando!!!!!!!!!

7 New Orleans

FINAL FANTASY GRIZZLY BEARS -

28 New York Saturday…
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House

I suspect owen pallet will have more concerts in the year, maybe once i can travel we can catch a ashow in Montreal ,if we’re lucky maybe Arcade fire as well…..

in the next couple of days more tour dates will come out…nothing from Sufjan!!!! geeezzzz

Tulia, Texas video-

I would love for us to go watch this film. I met Vanita Gupta ,one of the lead attys in the case and the story is INSANE. I want to see this! ha!

Hands On Miami in partnership with Independent Lens, Florida International University’s Center for Leadership and Service, Channel 2 your local PBS station and Generation Engage are excited to present the Community Cinema series, showing on Friday, January 23, 2008 beginning at 7:00pm at Florida International University’s University Park campus in GC 140. Join us for free popcorn and screening of Tulia, Texas. About the film: A lone undercover cop moves into a small farming town. By the end of the blazing summer of 1999, 46 people are arrested for selling cocaine–nearly all of them African American. It was heralded as one of the biggest drug busts in Texas history, until a team of lawyers set out to uncover the truth.Please note: you may sign yourself up to attend this event as you would sign up for a regular service project, or you may just show up to the event. For more information about the Community Cinema please click here! or contact Judie Stork at judie@handsonmiami.org or 305-646-7462.

Engagement

Ponzi Scheme affects important non profits..

The impact of this scheme goes beyond comprehension… some non profits are already scheduled to close in January. Important names mentioned in the article : Innocence Project and the UJA Federation, Foundation for Humanity which is Eli Weisel’s Foundation. It’s upsetting.

The article is worth the read.

reading—http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/business/16charity.html?hp

William fitzsimmons

http://www.canyouseethesunset.com/article/review-william-fitzsimmons-the-sparrow-and-the-crow

greg recommended….very sufjanesk….a little more poppy kinda….the song u still hurt me…haven’t listened to lyrics really…dont know about his voice… im undecided…

ok the other song there…the girls voice is amazing…

Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists

I have a favorite economist.  I was going to say I have a new favorite economist, but I don’t think I ever had a favorite economist before.  Anyway, his name is Luigi Zingales from the University of Chicago.  He authored far and away the best piece I have read on General Motors, which proposes putting GM into a pre-packaged bankruptcy and using federal funds to finance a DIP loan, but requiring a bank make the ultimate lending decisions.  In doing so, Zinglaes proposes that the bank would be liable for further losses made after the initial DIP loan, and thus would not allow GM to continue squandering the governments funds if its assets continue to decline in value.  Zingales also proposes solving the problem posed by consumers not buying a car from an auto manufacturer in bankruptcy by requiring GM to purchase third-party insurance and making management and workers responsible for the quality of cars by linking VEBA payments and executive compensation to an index based on the cost of warranty claims.

Even more thought-provoking, Zingales wrote a piece opposing the original Paulson bailout plan, entitled “Why Paulson is wrong.”

Recognizing that our financial institutions can not afford the often long and drawn-out chapter 11 process, he advocates “cramming down” a restructuring plan on creditors, where part of the debt is forgiven in exchange for some equity or some warrants.  In other words, Congress should pass a law allowing failing financial firms to initiate a quick bankruptcy (which would not trigger any defaults in loans) whereby partial debt forgiveness or a debt-for-equity swap is mandated.  The government could entice failing firms to enter this restructuring process by cutting off access to short-term debt windows.  This process would leave the taxpayers out of the picture, and avoid a long chapter 11 process.  Deposits would be exempt (so not to burden main street), as would credit default swaps (so as to avoid getting caught in the tangled webs that have burdened the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy).

But if this plan is so simple and at no cost to the taxpayer, why no expert has mentioned it?  I’ll let Zinglaes explain:

“The major players in the financial sector do not like it. It is much more appealing for the financial industry to be bailed out at taxpayers’ expense than to bear their share of pain. Forcing a debt-for-equity swap or a debt forgiveness would be no greater a violation of private property rights than a massive bailout, but it faces much stronger political opposition.

The appeal of the Paulson solution is that it taxes the many and benefits the few. Since the many (we, the taxpayers) are dispersed, we cannot put up a good fight in Capitol Hill; while the financial industry is well represented at all the levels. It is enough to say that for 6 of the last 13 years, the Secretary of Treasury was a Goldman Sachs alumnus. But, as financial experts, this silence is also our responsibility. Just as it is
difficult to find a doctor willing to testify against another doctor in a malpractice suit, no matter how egregious the case, finance experts in both political parties are too friendly to the industry they study and work in.

The decisions that will be made this weekend matter not just to the prospects of the U.S. economy in the year to come; they will shape the type of capitalism we will live in for the next fifty years. Do we want to live in a system where profits are private, but losses are socialized? Where taxpayer money is used to prop up failed firms? Or do we want to live in a system where people are held responsible for their decisions, where imprudent behavior is penalized and prudent behavior rewarded? For somebody like me who believes strongly in the free market system, the most serious risk of the current situation is that the interest of few financiers will undermine the fundamental workings of the capitalist system. The time has come to save capitalism from the capitalists.“

i love this, so im posting it again…by Anna Quindlen

… Get a life in which you are not alone. Findgood friends and people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is notleisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an e-mail.

Write a letter. Get a life in whichyou are generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever,

and that you haveno business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness

that you want tospread it around. Take money you would have spent on beers

and give it to charity.

Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister.
All of you want to do well but if you don’t do good too, then doing well will never be

enough. It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy

to take for granted the color of our kids’ eyes , the way the melody in a symphony rises

and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of to live.
I learned to live many years ago. I learned to love the journey, not the destination.

I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.

I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I

believed in it, completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what

I had learned. By telling them this: Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the backyard

with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness,
because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived.

by Anna Quindlen

Immigration explained through diagrams….

WHAT PART OF LEGAL IMMIGRATION DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?????????

COOLEST EXPLANATION CHART

http://www.reason.com/images/07cf533ddb1d06350cf1ddb5942ef5ad.jpg

(i dont know how to link!!!!!1 sorry!!!!!) im an idiot!