This week: in our community

Juana Villegas: A Pregnant Woman Detained
This video documents Juana Villegas relate the trauma of being shackled and detained while giving birth. She was nine months pregnant when she was stopped for "careless driving," but instead of receiving a customary traffic citation, she was arrested and detained, and remained shackled while giving birth. All of this took place because of the 287(g) agreement between local police and federal immigration authorities.

Ali: An HIV+ Man Suffers in Detention
This video tells the story of Ali, a lawful permanent resident who had been living in New York City for 30 years. After being picked up on a misdeamor, he spent more than a year in an immigration detention facility where he witnessed the worst kind of physical abuse and medical mistreatment, including having to fight to get his daily HIV medications.

Immigrant Detention Centers Under Suspicion
In this program, NPR's radio show Tell Me More talks with NY Times reporter Nina Bernstein and her experiences reporting from the Donald W. Wyatt detention facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island. The Wyatt facility had been under suspicion for an immigrant death in its facility, but, as Bernstein finds out, detention facilities do not have to report deaths in their facilities or let family members know if an immigrant has been picked up or transferred.

Obama's Immigration Challenge: More about Words than Policy
This article put out by the Center for International Policy's (CIP) Americas Program analyzes what role President Obama could have in pushing for immigration reform this year through his ability to tell a story and weave a new narrative about immigration in this country.

Push on Immigration Crimes is Said to Shift Focus
This New York Times article points out how the last administration's push on immigration enforcement has drawn resources away from fighting other crimes, notably weapons prosecutions, organized crime prosecutions, and public corruption prosecutions. This data is further backed up by a recent Trac Report.

Latinos Recall Patterns of Attack Before Killing
This NY Times article discusses the pattern of attacks on Latinos before Marcelo Lucero was killed last month. It emphasizes how both immigrants' fears of reporting crimes to police due to enhanced immigration enforcement and the police's failure to not consistantly enter crimes against Latinos into their computerized pattern tracking system caused a pattern of hate crimes against the Latino population to go unnoticed.