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An operation by federal immigration agents in Detroit set off protests from Latino and church groups on Wednesday after the officers stopped two illegal immigrants as they were dropping off their children at school.

Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement followed both immigrants, who are from Mexico, as they left their homes in southwest Detroit on Tuesday morning, officials from the agency said. Both men had children in their vehicles.

One of the men, Jorge Hernandez, said he was pulled over by agents in unmarked cars across the street from his 4-year-old daughter’s school, the Manuel Reyes Vistas Nuevas Head Start center in southwest Detroit. Mr. Hernandez was questioned but eventually released.

The other man, Hector Orozco Villa, told immigrant advocates that he had been detained by agents near the elementary school of two of his children, Cesar Chavez Academy, a few blocks from the Head Start center. Mr. Orozco remains in the custody of the agency, which is known as ICE.

The presence of the immigration agents has spread alarm among arriving parents and children in the Latino neighborhood, school officials said. More than 100 people rallied on Wednesday to protest, according to a report in The Detroit News, saying the immigration agency had broken an earlier promise to avoid arrests near schools and other community gathering points.

“It is very alarming to me to have this happen during the rush hour of people taking their children to school,” said Rashida Tlaib, a Democratic state representative who attended the rally. “We are really worried about the impact on these United States citizen children.” Several of Mr. Hernandez’s and Mr. Orozco’s children were born in the United States.

The incident revealed the raw sensitivities in some immigrant communities as federal agents are required to carry out the increasingly complex deportation policy of the Obama administration. Agents have been instructed to focus on capturing illegal immigrants who are convicted criminals or repeat immigration violators, and to avoid detaining those who have committed no serious crimes and have strong family ties to the United States. Determining which individuals fall in either category has been a difficult balance for ICE to maintain while carrying out the directive.

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The federal government will formally instruct immigration agents to consider same-sex relationships the same way as heterosexual relationships in deciding whether a person should be deported.

The announcement by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano comes as welcome news to some Democrats in Congress, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), who had voiced concerns already that informal instructions to do so could be ignored by immigration agents.

Napolitano said on Thursday she would issue the instruction in writing to immigration agents. The administration had only informally indicated same-sex relationships would be taken into account when making deportation decisions.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed a new law that will allow hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses and vetoed another that would have restricted sheriffs from helping federal authorities detain undocumented Californians for potential deportation.

The driver’s license measure will allow illegal immigrants to drive legally in California if they qualify for a new federal work permit program. The Obama administration’s executive order known as Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) allows illegal immigrants who came to the United States before they were 16, and who are now 30 or younger and meet certain other criteria, to obtain work permits.

“Gov. Brown believes the federal government should pursue comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship,” said Brown spokesman Gil Duran. “President Obama has recognized the unique status of these students, and making them eligible to apply for driver’s licenses is an obvious next step.”

A while back we posted on Alabama’s immigration bill which would allow schools to check the immigration status of new students in its public schools. Part of Alabama’s immigration law that ordered public schools to check the citizenship of new students was ruled unconstitutional Monday by the federal appeals court that also said police in that state and Georgia could demand papers from criminal suspects they had detained.

The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Alabama schools provision wrongly singled out children who were in the country illegally. Alabama was the only state that passed such a requirement; the 11th Circuit previously had blocked that part of the law from being enforced.

Judges said fear of the law “significantly deters undocumented children from enrolling in and attending school.”

The United States is favored to win the most medals of any country in the 2012 London Olympics, continuing a long tradition of dominance in the Summer Olympics. A survey of all the summer Olympics shows that the United States consistently finishes in the top three, and has the most first-place medal count finishes of any country in the world. Following 1896, when the United States finished second to Greece, Americans would dominate most of the 20th century, routinely doubling the medal count of the second place nation. With the exception of a few Olympics, when Germany, the Soviet Union, and most recently China, rose to prominence, the Summer Olympics have been a time for Americans to truthfully proclaim, “We’re number one!”
The real question is: What explains this tradition of American Olympic excellence over the years? Going strictly by population numbers, China and India should win the most medals since they have the largest populations in the world. Both China and India have over four times as many potential Olympians to choose from, which in theory should give them an advantage. China did win the most gold medals in 2008, but the United States won the overall medal count that year by ten. This year, the United States is projected to match China’s gold medal count, while also winning the overall medal count. In contrast, India only won three medals in 2008 and is not projected to win many more in 2012, proving that it takes much more than a large population to succeed in the Olympics.

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In new statements regarding Obama’s immigration policy, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano defended President Barack Obama’s decision to stop deporting many illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children and letting them apply for work permits. “Our nation’s immigration laws must be enforced in a strong and sensible manner,” Napolitano said in prepared remarks submitted to the House Judiciary Committee. “But they are not designed to be blindly enforced without consideration given to the individual circumstances of each case.”
Obama announced in June that he was easing immigration laws by executive order for many illegal immigrants brought to the country as children. Under the policy change, illegal immigrants would be eligible to avoid deportation if they can prove they are 30 years old or younger, have been in the United States at least five years, arrived before they turned 16, graduated from a U.S. high school or earned a GED or are currently in school and don’t have a criminal record. They can also apply for a work permit that will be good for two years, with no limit on how many times it can be renewed.

The policy change could affect more than a million illegal immigrants and partially achieves the goals of the so-called DREAM Act,the legislation that was to provide a pathway to citizenship for many young illegal immigrants.

Napolitano has said DHS has broad authority to use discretion when deciding which illegal immigrants to deport, and said Thursday that the recent Supreme Court decision striking down much of Arizona’s strict immigration law backs up that authority. “Indeed as the Supreme Court noted in its recent decision on the Arizona immigration law, `a special feature of the removal system is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials,'” Napolitano said.

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The Pew Research Center survey and accompanying report says Asian-Americans now make up 5.8 percent of the nation’s population, up from less than 1 percent in 1965, when the modern immigration wave from Asia began.

Asians recently passed Hispanics as the largest group of new immigrants to the U.S. In 2010, 36 percent of new immigrants to the U.S. were Asian, up from 19 percent in 2000, according to Census figures.

The Pew report, titled “The Rise of Asian Americans,” finds that Asians are the highest-income and best-educated racial group in the U.S. Nearly half (49 percent) of Asian-American adults have a college degree, and they boast a median annual household income of $66,000 (versus the U.S. median of $49,800).

The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States has come to a standstill. After four decades that brought 12 million current immigrants—more than half of whom came illegally—the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped—and may have reversed, according to a new analysis by the Pew Hispanic Center of multiple government data sets from both countries.

The standstill appears to be the result of many factors, including the weakened U.S. job and housing construction markets, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, the growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings, the long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rates and changing economic conditions in Mexico.

The report is based on the Center’s analysis of data from five different Mexican government sources and four U.S. government sources. The Mexican data come from the Mexican Decennial Censuses (Censos de Población y Vivienda), the Mexican Population Counts (Conteos de Población y Vivienda), the National Survey of Demographic Dynamics (Encuesta Nacional de la Dinámica Demográfica or ENADID), the National Survey of Occupation and Employment (Encuesta Nacional de Ocupación y Empleo or ENOE), and the Survey on Migration at the Northern Border of Mexico (Encuesta sobre Migración en la Frontera Norte de México or EMIF-Norte). The U.S. data come from the 2010 Census, the American Community Survey, the Current Population Survey and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Recently, the drug cartels have taken to placing ads in the newspaper to find drivers to transport drugs across the border into the U.S. Ads that say things like “Would you like to work in San Diego?” or “A company that is a leader in its field is looking for male employees.” may seem innocuous to the casual reader, but these job offers come with a major hitch: smuggling narcotics.

The scenario has become increasingly familiar to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the San Ysidro and Otay Mesa border crossings. Over the past year, more than three dozen drivers caught with drug loads claimed that they had answered want ads, and were simply complying with their new employer’s request that they drive a vehicle across the border.

“It’s all centered around employment,” said Lester Hayes, a group supervisor for ICE Homeland Security Investigations at the San Ysidro border crossing. “We see hard-working people that are just trying to provide for their families who get caught up in this game.”