Russell Pearce Recall Election: Arizona Immigration Law Architect Defeated By Jerry Lewis

Elise Foley elise@huffingtonpost.com State Sen. Russell Pearce, the controversial architect of Arizona's immigration law, was voted out of office on Tuesday evening in a special recall election. He was defeated by Jerry Lewis, a fellow Republican who does not support the immigration crackdown and has vowed to reject gifts from special interest groups and work to ban gifts for legislators. Lewis won with roughly 54 percent of the vote, state officials announced on Tuesday evening. P...

Morgue To Charge For Storing Bodies; Many Are Deceased Migrants

By Jill Reploggle TUCSON — The Pima County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to start charging rent for bodies that aren't picked up from the county morgue in a timely manner. The new fee is aimed at reducing overcrowding – primarily from deceased border-crossers. Pima County provides autopsy services and morgue space for much of the state. Many of the bodies held at the morgue are of migrants who die crossing into the U.S. from Mexico - 230 of them in 2010. To house the excess bodies, th...

San Diego Cabdriver’s shooting death under investigation

LEMON GROVE — Authorities are investigating an apparent homicide after responding to a traffic accident involving a taxi cab early Sunday and discovering the driver had been shot. Lemon Grove firefighters responded to a call of a rollover vehicle about 3:50 a.m. near the intersection of Main Street and Broadway Avenue. The cabdriver, 39-year-old Jalaludin Hamrah, was removed from the vehicle and paramedics observed a bullet wound to his upper body, according to the Sheriff’s Departm...

Cecilia Muñoz Catches Heat From Former Immigration Allies

WASHINGTON -- Since the beginning of his administration, immigration reform has been a sensitive issue for President Barack Obama. As the disappointments have mounted among immigration activists, one official in particular has become the object of their frustration. Cecilia Muñoz, one of the highest-ranking Latino officials in the White House and a longtime immigration and civil rights activist, has borne heavy criticism for the administration's policies -- and often rhetoric -- on de...

U.S. Deports 46K Parents With Citizen Kids in Just Six Months

by Seth Freed Wessler Between January and June of 2011, the United States carried out more than 46,000 deportations of the parents of U.S.-citizen children, according to previously unreleased federal data obtained by Colorlines.com’s publisher, the Applied Research Center. The figures reflect a striking increase in the rate of removals of parents and raise serious concerns about the impact of these deportations on children, many of whom are left behind. ...

Thousands of Kids Taken From Parents In U.S. Deportation System

by Seth Freed Wessler Clara’s eldest kid was 6 years old and her youngest just a year old when it happened. Josefina’s baby was 9 months. All three children were ripped from their mothers and sent to live in foster homes with strangers. Clara and Josefina, sisters in their early 30s who lived together in a small northern New Mexico town, had done nothing to harm their children or to elicit the attention of the child welfare department. Yet one morning last y...