The Associated Press reports the federal government is telling gun sellers in border states that they must report anyone who has purchased two high-powered rifles within a five day period.

The guidelines affect New Mexico, California, Arizona, and Texas.

The Justice Department made the argument before a judge after a coalition of gun store owners protested the two-month old rule. Federal lawyers argued before a judge that the restrictions curb the in-flow of weapons to Mexican drug cartels.

From the AP:

It requires sellers in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to give the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives information about purchasers who buy two or more semi-automatic rifles greater than .22 caliber within five days.

Justice Department attorney Daniel Reiss said having a database of multiple purchasers gives ATF agents the power to trace gun sales within minutes, rather than a multi-day effort to trace the weapons back through the manufacturer, to the seller and eventually the buyer. He said two investigations have already been opened in the short time that the new reporting has been required.

“Without these reports it’s very difficult to identify these straw purchasers” who are buying the guns to pass on to the drug cartels, he said.

U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer questioned whether monitoring lawful gun sales is an appropriate way to stop the flow of guns to Mexican gangs. The requirement was imposed amid controversy over ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious which tried to track guns suspected of being bought by straw purchasers back to gun-smuggling ringleaders, who have long eluded law enforcement. But ATF agents lost track of 1,400 of the more than 2,000 guns identified by Fast and Furious as possibly straw purchases.

This is the second time in recent weeks federal government pressed on New Mexico gun regulations.

Earlier, The New Mexico Independent reported on a letter sent to gun store owners by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The owners were instructed to withhold the sale of arms or munitions to anyone suspected of having an interaction or addiction to prescription drugs, including marijuana.

Paul said he does not want to remove all 11 million undocumented immigrants, but insisted “we must have secure borders and we must not reward people for breaking the law.”

“I don’t think people should come here and esaily become citizens who can vote and receive social benefits,” Paul said, but he added there must be a program to allow “people who want to work to come.”

Paul said there should an assimilation program, but borders remain important and that citizenship for U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants should not automatic.

Asked if the tea party is an anti-immigrant party Paul said, “I can’t tell you a thing about it because it is sort of all over the place.”

Diario Las Americas, a Miami-based Spanish-language news outlet, wrote late last week that George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism and Ronald Reagan’s “pragmatism” in immigration have been “buried by the new Republican militancy,” due to tea party pressure. The outlet says Republicans are “risking a defeat in 2012″ over the issue.

Las Americas also said that Republican presidential debates have become a competition for who is the strongest or the weakest candidate on illegal immigration. Immigration enforcement activists have said GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry’s distant second-place in the recent Florida straw poll was due to his “weak” statements on immigration.

According to Las Americas, the Republican presidential candidate will need “at least 40 precent of the Hispanic vote to win the general elections.”

GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, who has steadily become a central figure in today’s Republican Party, spoke in August at the Ronald Reagan Library. His message: Americans want the nation to be free and prosperous, but also compassionate.

New York Daily News columnist Albor Ruiz wrote Sunday that “Rubio supports mandatory E-Verify, has adopted the vacuous GOP mantra ‘border security first,’ and despite past support for a Florida in-state tuition bill, now opposes the federal DREAM Act.”

“But no matter how far right he goes, Rubio will never be American enough for some crazies in the birthers movement,” Ruiz wrote.

He added:

The GOP’s Great Latino Hope could turn out not to be such a good idea after all.

A poll conducted by Latino Decisions on the eve of last November’s election found 78% of Cuban-Americans would vote for Rubio, but only 40% of non-Cuban Latinos would do the same. And this was during his moderate phase.

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez acknowledged that her grandparents came to the U.S. without documents in an interview with Univision Albuquerque affiliate KLUZ-TV.

“I know they arrived without documents, especially my father’s father,” she said. (Here’s the full TV report, in Spanish.) The Santa Fe New Mexican had already reported this back in July, but Martinez hadn’t spoken about it publicly. NPR summarized the interview:

In her interview with KLUZ, the reporter asked if her grandfather would be considered “a threat against public safety,” a charge that Martinez has made against undocumented immigrants in her state.

Martinez said that times were different when her grandparents entered the United States. Back, then, she said, people crossed the border freely. Now, she said, especially after Sept. 11, “we have to make sure people don’t get a license using fake papers.”

This comes during her high-profile push to end the practice of allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses.

Antonio Diaz Chacon, 23, who gained national headlines for chasing down a kidnapper to save a six-year old girl in Albuquerque last week, told the media that he is an illegal immigrant.

“He thinks this happened for a reason,” said his wife, Martha. She is a U.S. citizen, but Diaz Chacon said that he gave up on attempts to get citizenship because it was too expensive. Diaz Chacon is from Chihuahua, Mexico, and has been living in Albuquerque for four years.

Diaz Chacon overheard a neighbor yelling at a man to let go of a six-year old girl on the night of August 15. He then saw the man push the girl into a van. As his wife called 911, he followed the van for about 15 minutes in his truck before the van crashed. The man, Philip Garcia, 29, ran off, while Diaz Chacon got the little girl.

Mayor Richard Barry of Albuquerque presented Diaz Chacon with a certificate Friday and declared the day in his honor.

The Roman Catholic Bishops of New Mexico support the current driver’s license law allowing foreign nationals to obtain a driver’s license with New Mexico residency, and oppose Gov. Susana Martinez’ push to change the law.

From their op-ed:

We support extending driver’s license privileges only to residents of the state. We are in favor of allowing individuals without Social Security numbers to obtain licenses provided that they present other acceptable forms of identification, such as a valid passport, consular identification card, or other recognized government-issued documents, currently required by present law. The present law, when enforced, addresses the issue of fraudulent documents. We have in the past called for a compromise that can strengthen the law and yet issue driver s licenses. We continue to call on the Legislature and the governor to work diligently on a compromise. We believe that this is in the interest of all New Mexicans, and our rationale for this position is as follows:

Licenses for all drivers make our highways safer, since unlicensed drivers have not been tested and, therefore, present a potential danger to everyone using our roads. In addition, unlicensed drivers tend to raise everyone s insurance rates since the former cannot obtain auto insurance.

Licensed drivers make our communities safer because they are more easily identified and tracked. If a law enforcement officer stops an unlicensed driver, that individual might easily give a false name. Such names would not be found in the state’s database, thus undermining law enforcement s efforts to determine whether there are outstanding warrants or other matters related to the person in question.

Repeal of the current driver’s license law would detract from limited state resources at a time of economic crisis. We want our law enforcement and court resources focused on the apprehension of dangerous criminals, rather than on the detention of normally hard-working immigrants.

And, finally, without legal access to driver’s licenses, immigrant workers would not be able to travel to their places of employment, undermining the economic stability of their families as well as the many New Mexico businesses, farms, and ranches that depend on their labor.

According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Catholics make up about 26 percent of New Mexico’s population. Religious leaders in Alabama have criticized the state’s tough immigration law that makes it a crime to knowingly transport, rent property or harbor illegal immigrants, saying that it criminalizes parts of their Christian ministry.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement sent out letters to 39 governors Friday, terminating all existing Memoranda of Agreement between states and ICE for the Secure Communities program, which shares fingerprints collected by state and local law enforcement to deport criminals. The letters say simply that such MOAs are not necessary to enforce the program.

John Denko,  former New Mexico Secretary of the Department of Public Safety, signed an agreement (pdf) in September 2009 to implement the program.

ICE had been trying to get states to sign on to the program. It originally described the program as voluntary, but later changed course and said that fingerprint data shared with the FBI would be shared with ICE anyway. However, New York, Illinois and other localities decided to opt out of the program after concerns were raised that it would hamper cooperation with the police among immigrants and that immigrants were being deported before being convicted of a crime or for minor offenses.

According to the Los Angeles Times, 77,000 immigrants have been deported under the program, including 28,000 violent offenders.

An analysis by the Transactional Records Clearinghouse at Syracuse University shows that two immigration judges in El Paso, Tex., have a much higher denial rate than the national average. El Paso borders Juarez, Mexico, a city known for its out-of-control drug violence; there have been about 1,220 homicides this year, while there were 3,100 in 2010.

Judges rejected 53.2 percent of asylum cases nationally between 2006 and 2011. However, two judges in El Paso denied 83.3 percent of cases. Judge Thomas C. Roepke denied 148 of 153 petitions, for a 96.7 percent denial rate. Judge William L. Abbott denied 74.6 percent of cases, or 144 out of 193.

The study notes, “the unusual persistence of these disparities — no matter how the asylum cases are examined — indicates that the identity of the judge who handles a particular matter often is more important than the underlying facts.”

Asylum-seekers need to be in the United States; be afraid of persecution; be harmed or fear harm by the government or others; be affected by at least one of several defined conditions, including political opinion, race, religion, nationality, and social group; and not be a “dangerous person.”

Immigration lawyers say judges look less favorably upon Mexican applicants for asylum because the United States has given Mexico significant political backing and financial assistance to fight the drug cartels, and admitting that the government cannot protect its citizens — or persecutes them — would harm relations.

Meanwhile, the State Department’s 2010 Human Rights Report on Mexico said the country reported, “unlawful killings by security forces; kidnappings; physical abuse; poor and overcrowded prison conditions; arbitrary arrests and detention; corruption, inefficiency, and lack of transparency that engendered impunity within the judicial system; confessions coerced through torture; violence and threats against journalists leading to self-censorship.”

The United States deported a record of nearly 393,000 people in the fiscal year ending September 30, according to statistics (pdf) from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). About half were deported for criminal convictions, while the other half were deported for “non-criminal immigration violations.”

The number of deportations rose sharpest from FY2007 to FY2008, rising from 291,060 deportations to 369,221 deportations.

The number of those deported on less-serious traffic violations rose from 4,527 in FY2008 to 13,028 in FY2010, as did those for drunk-driving from 10,851 to 27,635. Deportations due to drug-related crimes also rose from 36,053 to 45,003 in two years.

Gov. Susana Martinez ordered the Motor Vehicle Department to send out 10,000 letters to the estimated 85,000 foreign nationals who have New Mexico Driver’s Licenses but no Social Security numbers, asking them to to prove they still live in the state.

Those who get a letter must make an appointment with MVD within 30 days, and bring proof of residency — a lease, bank statement, pay stubs, utility bills or other verifying documents. If the license-holder does not show or cannot prove state residency, then his license is canceled.

Martinez wants to repeal the 2003 measure allowing foreign nationals to obtain driver’s licenses — only Washington State has a similar law — but the Senate tabled the bill. Gov. Richardson signed the law as a public safety measure — illegal immigrants already drive to their jobs, giving them licenses and allowing them to have auto insurance would make the roads safer.

However, the Martinez administration says the system is vulnerable to fraud and abuse.

“Thirty-five percent of our phone calls to make an appointment come from area codes from outside New Mexico,” said Tax and Revenue Secretary Demesia Padilla. “We had one address used 60 times for a place of residence.”

This rule will allow foreign nationals who live in New Mexico to keep their licenses, while canceling those who have moved out-of-state or showed New Mexico residency just to obtain a driver’s license.