Grocery Store Workers Go On Hunger Strike Over Stagnant Wages

By Dave Jamieson All night long, Jose Garcia performs his job while surrounded by food -- a painful bit of irony, he says. The 52-year-old Mexican immigrant works the overnight shift cleaning floors inside a Cub Foods store in Minneapolis, Minn., a job he's mostly appreciated for the nine years he's held it down. But lately, waxing aisle after aisle filled with groceries has simply reminded him of how little he has. Despite his long tenure with the same cleaning company, Garcia says he ...

L.A. is urged to support limiting local participation in deportation program

By Paloma Esquiviel and Lee Romney Adding their voices to a growing number of opponents, Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard C. Parks and Councilwoman Jan Perry have called on the city to support limiting the scope of local participation in a controversial federal deportation program. The City Council resolution proposed Tuesday on the Secure Communities program comes as San Francisco County prepares to implement a new policy seeking to do the same. On Wednesday, law enforcement officials,...

FBI: Corrupt US border agents a ‘serious’ threat

By Mark Greenblatt HOUSTON --  New figures show 122 current or former U.S. federal agents and employees of the Customs and Border Protection agency have been arrested or indicted for corruption since October of 2004. It is a trend that has both the FBI and key members of Congress concerned. In addition, 92 of those cases were considered instances of “Mission Compromising Corruption,” in which the employee violated, or facilitated the violation of the laws the agency enforces-- such as th...

Minuteman to Tea Party: A Grassroots Rebranding

by David Holthouse for Media Matters Last August, more than 600 right-wing activists gathered for a Tea Party Nation rally on private land near the U.S.-Mexico border in Cochise County, Arizona. Fluttering in the desert breeze were hundreds of tiny American flags attached to a border fence of 15-foot-tall rusty poles. Sheriff Joe Arpaio at a Tea Party Nation rally on the border last August Rally speakers included Tea Party candidates for the US Senate and House of Rep...

Secure Communities program: A flawed deportation tool

LA Times Editorial The program, once billed as a voluntary partnership between the Department of Homeland Security and localities, is now mired in controversy. When federal officials first announced the Secure Communities program in 2008, they billed it as a powerful tool in the battle to identify and deport illegal immigrants who had been convicted of violent crimes. Dozens of states, including California, signed on, agreeing that police would submit the fingerprints of all arrestees to b...

LA County Sheriff Baca to Undocumented Immigrants: No Constitution For You!

By Danny Rangel Sheriff Lee Baca had some shocking news for the residents of Los Angeles County this week: apparently, if your papers aren't in perfect order, the Constitution doesn't apply to you. Last Thursday, in a radio interview with KCRW in Los Angeles, Sheriff Baca (no stranger to controversy) let loose with statements that dangerously distorted the constitutional rights of undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles County, sparking a wave of protest and a Change.org petition calli...