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Recently AILA shared some information about special immigrant religious workers. USCIS reminds special immigrant religious workers, who have a pending or approved Form I-360, to file their Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status,(Form I-485), on or before Aug. 31, 2009. Special immigrant religious workers who wish to file a Form I-360 petition with an I-485 application should also file on or before Aug. 31, 2009.

USCIS is issuing this reminder because the U.S. Department of State recently published its September 2009 Visa Bulletin, stating that visas for the employment based fourth preference category, which includes special immigrant religious workers, will become unavailable effective Sept. 1, 2009. As a result, USCIS will reject Form I-485 applications submitted on or after Sept. 1, 2009, because an immigrant visa will not be immediately available, as required by INA 245(a).

USCIS will only accept properly filed Form I-485 applications based on pending or approved Form I-360 petitions seeking the special immigrant religious worker classification of either minister (SD-1) or non-minister (SR-1) or I-485 applications filed concurrently with I-360 petitions seeking SD-1 or SR-1 classification through Aug. 31, 2009.

Special immigrant religious ministers, who are not subject to the Sept. 30, 2009 sunset date, and who do not file on or before Aug. 31, 2009, must wait until visas for fourth preference special immigrant religious workers become available before they can apply to adjust status.

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As the prospects for Immigration reform are becoming more of a reality, so does the debate about illegal Immigration is more real than ever. A story just came in from CNN an Arizona man caught leaving water bottles in the desert for illegal immigrants has been sentenced to 300 hours of community service and a year of probation.

Walt Staton, a member of the group No More Deaths, left full water bottles in December in Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge for the illegal immigrants who routinely pass through the 18,000-acre refuge. Read more here

As the Immigration debate heats up this summer, expect more stories like this one.

California taxpayers need to cover higher fees of private lawyers, who are hired by the state as the Attorney General’s Office doesn’t have the staff to handle all of the cases internally. In some instances, the state has employed outside counsel at hourly rates that reach $450 even while most of its in-house lawyers earn less than half that. Rates can be much higher, if the suits require private attorneys having a particular expertise.

Since January 2008, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has signed about $24 million in contracts with private lawyers hired because the Attorney General’s Office says it’s too shorthanded to take the jobs. The corrections department is seeking the additional help despite having about 80 lawyers of its own to handle a gamut of cases, with about a dozen of those assigned to prisoner-filed litigation.

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The analysis of census data from both the U.S. and Mexican governments, being released Wednesday by the Pew Hispanic Center, highlights the impact of the economic downturn on Mexican immigrants, many of whom enter the United States illegally. The study found that immigrants arriving from Mexico fell by 249,000 from March 2008 to March 2009, down nearly 60 percent from the previous year. As a result, the annual inflow of immigrants is now 175,000, having steadily decreased from a peak of 653,000 in 2005, before the bursting of the housing bubble dried up construction and other low-wage jobs.

The total population of Mexican-born immigrants in the U.S. also edged lower in the past year, from 11.6 million to 11.5 million, according to the study by Pew, an independent research group. Up to 85 percent of immigrants are believed to be in the country illegally.

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On July 9, the Senate, by a vote of 84 to 6, passed a DHS funding bill which includes a variety of immigration enforcement and benefits measures. The measure now goes to a House-Senate Conference Committee which must reconcile this bill with a funding measure previously passed by the House of Representatives which contains none of the immigration amendments added by the Senate.

Immigration Provisions: The Senate also adopted two amendments. The first would eliminate the “widow’s penalty”. This would allow foreign-born widows and orphans to remain eligible for permanent residence even when the U.S. citizen spouse/parent dies before they achieve such status. The second would extend the “Conrad 30” J waiver program for physicians and the religious worker program for non-ministers until September 30, 2012. Currently, both programs are due to expire on September 30, 2009.

The Senate bill includes an amendment by Senator Patrick Leahy which would make the EB-5 Regional Center Investor program permanent. Currently, the program is due to expire on September 30, 2009.

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The government has tens of billions of dollars left in the eye-popping $700 billion bank bailout fund created last fall, prompting a debate in Congress over what to do with it. The question of what to do with the money will grow more pressing in coming months as Congress takes a step back to consider the fate of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

Lawmakers had rushed to approve the money in October 2008 as Wall Street sat on the brink of collapse. Since then, even as the economy continues to wobble and high unemployment threatens the prospects for a speedy recovery; major banks have repaid $70 billion in assistance and expressed growing optimism about their ability to function without government assistance.

The Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, estimated on Thursday that the government has about $328 billion left in the fund that hasn’t been spent or legally committed. According to GAO, the government has disbursed approximately $339 billion and promised $102 billion more. That leaves some $259 in the fund plus the $70 billion banks have repaid.

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Legislation to ease immigration into the United States could be passed by the US Senate before the summer break, a leading US politician said yesterday in Dublin, though it would then face a battle to gain the support of a majority of the US House of Representatives. However, Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez from New York, a leading figure on immigration in Washington, said Ireland had no chance of reaching a bilateral deal with the United States to deal with undocumented Irish living illegally there.

US president Barack Obama made it clear in Washington in recent days during meetings with congressional leaders that he wants comprehensive immigration reform – which has been tried before and failed.

US senator Chuck Schumer (New York) is bringing legislation to the Senate by the end of July, said Ms Velazquez, one of a number of members of Congress in Ireland this week. “It is important because the speaker of the house has made it clear that she wants the Senate to pass the legislation first and then the house will take it,” she told The Irish Times.

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, said that it had begun an audit of 652 U.S. companies to verify whether their employees were eligible to work. Violations could lead to fines, as well as civil and criminal charges.

The Obama administration announced a crackdown on Wednesday on hundreds of companies suspected of employing illegal immigrants, signaling a shift in strategy: going after employers instead of workers.

However, it is yet to know what steps the government would pursue if it verified that an employer had hired illegal workers, or how severe penalties might be. It remains to be seen how much pressure the new policy could put on employers. Focus is on the eminent cases of employers who hire undocumented workers, and sometimes even assist in falsifying their paperwork to avoid detection.

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