Globe and Mail. August 14, 2008

One of the first U.S. army deserters from Iraq to seek refugee status has been ordered deported in a decision that sends the message that the Conservative government isn’t going to protect American soldiers who want to stay in Canada, immigration lawyers say. Jeremy Hinzman, 29, deserted the army in 2004 after learning his unit was to be deployed to Iraq. He was handed the deportation order yesterday after a Citizenship and Immigration officer decided his application, filed under the preremoval risk assessment program, didn’t qualify. The program evaluates the risk a claimant will face if he or she is to be sent back.

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The 2002 Homeland Security Act established its largest investigative and enforcement arm in 2003: the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) created “as a law enforcement agency for the post-9/11 era, to integrate enforcement authorities against criminal and terrorist activities, including the fights against human trafficking and smuggling, violent transnational gangs and sexual predators on children” – “criminal” and “terrorist” threats to the nation. Muslims are its principal targets. So are Latino immigrants, forced to seek work here because of NAFTA’s devastating effect on their lives and well-being. Turning logic, fairness and justice on its head in the current climate of fear, ICE calls them (and Muslims) “people….support(ing) terrorism and other criminal activities….against the United States” – 276,912 so-called “illegal aliens” removed from the country in FY2007 to justify its burgeoning budget to “keep America safe.”

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BBC. Tuesday, 29 July 2008

The new Australian government has abandoned the country’s controversial policy of jailing all asylum seekers.  In a major overhaul of immigration rules, the policy of detaining would-be asylum seekers in often remote jails will now be used only as a last resort. Children will no longer be held, and adults who are detained will have their situation evaluated every three months.

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Lena Sin. The Province. Monday, July 28, 2008

A Russian mail-order bride’s attempt to trade the anguish of her old life for a better one in the West has ended in bitter disappointment as she faces deportation from B.C. Nelli Tikhonova was a hopeful 20-year-old when she arrived in Surrey in 1996 with her American husband. Today, she’s a 32-year-old abandoned single mother. “It was beyond my control,” says Tikhonova. “[My husband] left at the end of 2000. He was going to Saipan [in the Northern Mariana Islands] for business purposes. He said he was going to return to take care of my [immigration] paperwork. He never did.” With no legal status in Canada because of her husband’s failure to process the immigration paperwork, Tikhonova now faces deportation despite being the mother of a Canadian-born child.

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The Deterrence Strategy of Homeland Security  By TOM BARRY, Counterpunch. June 7/8, 2008

When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) refers to its new deterrence strategy, the agency is not talking about nuclear arsenals, missile defense, or border security. For DHS, deterrence is a strategy of immigration control that relies on what U.S. law enforcement does best: imprisonment. The United States has more people in jail-2.3 million-than any other nation. Although the United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, it holds almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. One of every 100 adults in the “land of the free” is locked up. Immigrants are the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. prison population. The DHS agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains 300,000 immigrants annually, with some 32,000 immigrants in ICE detention centers on any given day. ICE’s budget for its Detention and Removal Operations has jumped from $959 million in 2004 to $2.3 billion today.

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