The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) passed the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday by a vote of 303-115, practically ensuring that the statutory bar to entry into the United States for HIV-positive immigrants and foreign visitors will be lifted.

Anyone who thinks that reasonable legal means exist for workers to migrate from Mexico to the United States and that migrants should just "do it the right way" need to read the story of Kentucky native Heather Suarez.

A new initiative called the National Immigrant Bond Fund has been created to collect donations and work with community groups to help men and women detained in ICE raids pay bond so they can pursue their case outside of jail.

The Florida Immigrant Coalition has put out a call for assistance to raise money to cover funeral costs for the family of Valery Joseph, the latest person to die in immigrant detention.

A federal investigation into the deaths of two immigrants who died in federal custody found that the U.S. immigration agency does not effectively monitor its detention facilities' compliance with its own detention standards.

"In the next eight years, we simply cannot allow our policy toward international law and human rights be subsumed entirely under the War on Terror," Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh told a room full of human rights advocates last month.

"Immigration law is extremely complicated. The two most complicated areas of federal law are immigration law and habeas corpus law, even though the representation of individuals caught up in these systems of law is very inadequate," Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals said.

As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement responds to media reports and Congressional testimony about poor medical care in its detention facilities, its representatives have been selective about what parts of the agency's medical coverage they discuss.