Tom Perez, the Obama administration's new Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights announced yesterday that , "the Civil Rights division is again open for business." This is a welcome change for a department that had been widely criticized for politicizing the agency, lagging in effectiveness and suppressing legitimate...
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Soon after Superintendent Arlene Ackerman arrived in Philadelphia in 2008, officials set up what was to be a friendly meeting with parents and representatives from immigrant groups.
The meeting lasted two hours and focused on one issue, according to people present: Immigrants were being beaten and harassed in city classrooms....
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Dec 17, 2009
Two days after the Justice Department announced federal indictments related to the fatal beating of a Mexican immigrant in Shenandoah, Pa., federal authorities said the charges were part of a larger effort to step up civil rights enforcement after nearly eight years of decreased hate crime prosecutions.
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America's Voice commends the U.S. Department of Justice for charging three officers of the Shenandoah, Pa. police department with obstruction of justice and other crimes in the beating death of a Mexican immigrant by several local teenagers last year.
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News broke yesterday that over half of the police force in the tiny Pennsylvania town of Shenandoah, PA – including the chief – have been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges brought by the Obama administration for obstructing a federal probe of a brutal hate crime and...
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Dec 15, 2009
Federal prosecutors charged three police officers in a racially tense Pennsylvania coal town with orchestrating a cover-up in the fatal beating of a Mexican immigrant by altering evidence or lying to the FBI in a case against two white high school football players.
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Andrea Nill over at the Wonk Room caught this racist right-wing holiday song, "Illegals in My Yard," set to the tune of the Christmas song, Feliz Navidad.
It goes:
Illegals in my yard. (3x) Sixteen arrive in a stolen car They're getting free organ transplants this Christmas....
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Dec 14, 2009
Reporting from Phoenix - The day after the federal government told Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio that he could no longer use his deputies to round up suspected illegal immigrants on the street, the combative Arizona sheriff did just that.
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The nation's 10% unemployment rate is feeding anti-immigrant sentiment, as Marcelo Ballvé reports for New America Media. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) critiqued President Barack Obama's recent jobs summit as "fatally flawed" because President Obama did not discuss wresting millions of jobs away from undocumented families. Smith's argument is flawed.
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Newsflash: Forget all that controversy surrounding CNN's Latinos in America series earlier this fall (CNN came under heavy fire for keeping incendiary host Lou Dobbs as a mainstream news anchor while trying to reach out to Latino audiences). Apparently, Lou Dobbs should now be known as Latinos' "great friend,"...
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