The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday on the thousands of would-be citizens who are caught in the U.S. government's backlog of naturalization applications.

The newspaper reports:

Nearly 320,000 people were waiting for their name checks to be completed as of Aug. 7, including more than 152,000 who had been waiting for more than six months, according to the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. More than 61,000 had been waiting for more than two years.

Immigration raids similar to those in northern Illinois have been happening around the country the past couple of weeks. Some of the accounts from families affected by Massachusetts raids are pretty similar to those reported this week in Waukegan.

Immigrants who have survived a violent crime have waited for years for the Department of Homeland Security to release U visa regulations that will offer them some immigration protection. The new U visa rule was finally announced Wednesday, and is expected to be posted to the Federal Register this week.

A federal judge on Friday ordered the government to temporarily halt the implementation of new regulations that many immigrant and worker rights activists feared would result in the unnecessary firing of immigrant workers.

On Labor Day, a common refrain for most Americans is talk of the last "official" weekend of summer, rather than an occasion to recognize and celebrate the contributions of workers.  This year, it's particularly poignant to consider the plight of workers who make significant contributions to our economy, yet are threatened by workplace raids, arbitrary neighborhood sweeps -- and the absence of a U.S. immigration policy that recognizes the importance of immigrant workers to our economy.

The local newspaper for Waukegan, Illinois, reports today on immigration raids that have occurred throughout the Chicago suburbs since Sunday. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has not yet formally announced the reason for the arrests, despite the fact that more than 50 people are believed to have been detained this week as a result of the raids.

The U.S. government proposed a new regulation yesterday that would require about 750,000 permanent residents who received their green card between 1979 and 1989 to reapply for a new green card.

The National Immigrant Justice Center, along with a pro bono attorney from the Chicago office of law firm Sidley Austin, won a victory today at the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The case, Oyekunle v. Gonzales, involved a woman who fled her native Nigeria because her husband's family threatened to force her to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM).

Newspapers this week reported four deaths in less than one month in the U.S. immigration detention centers. As members of Congress vote to spend tax money to add thousands more immigration detention beds, news about the government's failure to properly care for the current detention population is troubling.

The Washington Post reported on three of the deaths: