immigration

Former Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White was grilled on a range of issues by the Albuquerque City Council last night, before being confirmed as Albuquerque’s chief public safety officer. White was confirmed on an eight-to-one vote, with Councilor Rey Garduño dissenting.
Garduño questioned White extensively on his approach to crime, including the use of predictive modeling, which [...]

El Centro de la Raza program manager Meriah Heredia Griego says potential repercussions remain, and that the incident raises concerns about student confidentiality, especially for undocumented students.

Six-in-ten Hispanic adults in the U.S. who are neither citizens nor legal permanent residents are without health insurance, the Pew Hispanic Center reports. But an estimated 28 percent of Hispanic adults who are citizens or legal permanent residents don’t have health insurance either. That’s compared with 17 percent of the overall U.S. adult population who [...]

Albuquerque mayoral candidate Richard “R.J.” Berry is distorting the Albuquerque Police Department’s policy on immigration, officials say, and that could weaken the trust the department has worked to gain among the city’s immigrant community. Without that trust, victims or witnesses may be less likely to report crimes and cooperate with police investigations.

Steve Terrell of the Santa Fe New Mexican notes that the Milford Daily News called Governor Bill Richardson an “anchor baby,” a derogatory term used to refer to a child, born in the United States to immigrant parents, who is a citizen and can act as an anchor for other family who wish to come [...]

Latino lawmakers had long ago given up on the idea that illegal immigrants would receive any sort of subsidized health insurance under a health care reform bill, even if there are strong economic, public health and moral arguments to support the idea. But what they hadn’t expected – at least not before Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst earlier this month – was that immigrants would be so scapegoated in the health care debate that undocumented immigrants would be denied the opportunity even to purchase market-based private health insurance with their own money.

One of Albuquerque’s mayoral candidates is calling one of his opponents campaign themes divisive.

Former State Senate President Pro Tem Richard Romero said that State Rep. Richard Berry’s charge that Albuquerque is a “sanctuary city” is a “politically-charged wedge issue” meant to serve no purpose other than to divide the community.

Anti-immigration activists are fired up about the possible inclusion of some benefits for illegal immigrants in health care reform legislation. ”For 14 years, the Federation for American Immigration Reform has sponsored a mass lobbying campaign they call Hold Their Feet to the Fire. According to FAIR spokesman Ira Mehlman, this year’s event, coming days after the [...]

Mayoral candidate Richard Romero has weighed in on the debate about whether or not the Denny’s robbery and murder was attributable to immigration policies of the police department.

Albuquerque mayoral candidate Richard “R.J.” Berry and the state Republican Party said this week that police policies regarding immigrants are partly to blame for a violent robbery on the west side that left one person dead. Mayor Martin Chavez’s office responded that Berry and the state GOP are “endorsing racial profiling.”

The New York Times today posted a fascinating interactive map, called Immigration Explorer, which tracks immigration statistics in U.S. Census data from 1880 until the present.

To kick-off the Independent’s new feature highlighting New Mexicans from all walks of life, I connected with Claudia Medina — founder and executive director of Enlace Comunitario, which provides comprehensive domestic violence services to immigrant women.

Undocumented immigration is slowing, but the heightened focus on immigration enforcement has engendered widespread worry among the adult Hispanic population in the U.S., according to the Pew Hispanic Center in two reports released during the past month.

 
An audit of Bernalillo County ballots shows vote counting machines have a very low margin of error, differing an average of 1.9 percent from hand-counting, according to the Albuquerque Journal. The audit of ballots cast in the 2006 election was conducted by UNM along with the California Institute of Technology and the University of Utah. [...]