A federal judge today granted a preliminary injunction to prevent the U.S. Social Security Administration from sending "no-match" letters to employers whose workers' names cannot be confirmed in an error-ridden government database.

Senator Ted Kennedyof Massachusetts is the latest immigrant rights supporter to send a letter to Assistant Secretary of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Julie Meyers expressing concerns about proposed "performance-based" detention standards the agency says are coming soon.

The immigration raid at a government-contracted factory last March in New Bedford, Massachusetts, caught national attention with stories of missing parents and children who found themselves abandoned at the end of the school day. Several months later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement seems to be executing several raids on any given day and is more likely to arrest people right in their homes, sometimes in front of their children.

It's been a sad week for thousands of families who have been affected by large-scale Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on both U.S. coasts.

A coalition of national and local human rights organizations, including NIJC, sent a letter last week to Assistant Secretary of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Julie Meyers expressing their concerns about new "performance-based" immigration detention standards that Meyers has said the agency plans to release.

A police department in New York is rethinking its decision to cooperate with federal immigration agents in home raids, saying its police force was duped into an operation that targeted undocumented workers more than dangerous criminals.

A federal judge in San Francisco has extended an order temporarily prohibiting the Social Security Administration from sending so-called "no match" letters to employers whose workers' names do not match a federal database. The Department of Homeland Security rule is one of the government's most recent attempts to enforce immigration law by relying on questionable data and threatening the rights of U.S. citizen and non-citizen workers.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement released the questions and answers for a redesigned naturalization test that will be administered starting October 1, 2008. The agency rewrote the test to focus more heavily on U.S. civics and history.

Immigrant workers have faced an increasingly punitive environment since Congress failed to enact comprehensive immigration reform legislation earlier this year. But while many state and local governments around the nation have acquiesced to pressure to assist federal agents in immigration raids and other enforcement actions, the State of Illinois took an approach that defends the rights of workers and protects employers. And the federal government is suing.

The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York has filed a federal lawsuit charging that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers unlawfully raided immigrants' homes without warrants or other legal justification. The suit asks for a court order prohibiting ICE's New York Regional Office from conducting home raids until the agency develops clear guidelines to end unlawful entries.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) has produced a new nine-minute video, "Comprehensive Immigration Reform: An American Tradition," to serve as a tool for its members and for immigration advocates to use in reaching out to members of their communities, the media, and to policy makers.

In recent years, Congress has enacted several pieces of legislation that attempt to keep terrorists from obtaining immigration status in the United States.  The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 and the REAL ID Act of 2005 amended U.S. immigration laws to expand the definition of a "terrorist organization" and, in turn, dramatically broadened the class of people that are barred from admission to the United States for having provided material support to terrorists.  In practice these laws have prevented many genuine asylum seekers from gaining protection in the United States-including, ironically, those who were victims of terrorist activity.

Illinois Senator Richard Durbin offered the DREAM Act yesterday as an amendment to the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act. The act would provide a six-year path to legal status for young men and women who were brought to the United States by their parents when they were children and who fulfill certain responsibilities upon their graduation from high school.

Assistant Secretary of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Julie Myers has indicated that the agency is preparing to issue new "performance-based" detention standards. Unlike the current detention standards, which were developed in cooperation with non-governmental organizations, the new standards were developed by the agency alone and their content is still uncertain. 

When some students at Heritage Hill Elementary School in Cincinnati came home from their first day of school this month, they learned that their parents had been arrested and jailed by immigration officials and that their family may have to leave the country.

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday found that asylum seekers who flee persecution based on their sexual orientation should not be expected to reveal their sexual orientation during interviews with government officials that take place within hours of their arrival at the airport.