Substandard and abusive conditions in immigration detention “are of the utmost importance,” a federal judge in Manhattan said Thursday, ruling that the Department of Homeland Security’s 2 ½-year delay in responding to a petition for legally enforceable regulations was “unreasonable as a matter of law.”

The judge, Denny Chin of Federal District Court in Manhattan, ordered the Obama administration to grant or deny the petition asking for detention rules within 30 days. He denied the government’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit, filed last year by two former immigration detainees and two advocacy agencies, seeking to force a response.

The Justice Department has rejected Georgia's system of using Social Security numbers and driver's license data to check whether prospective voters are citizens, a process that was a subject of a federal lawsuit in the weeks leading up to November's election.

In a letter released on Monday, the Justice Department said the state's voter verification program is frequently inaccurate and has a "discriminatory effect" on minority voters. The decision means Georgia must halt the citizenship checks, although the state can still ask the Justice Department to reconsider, according to the letter and to the Georgia secretary of state's office.

Thousands of impoverished elderly, disabled or blind legal residents of New York State, including refugees, will be limited to $352 a month in public aid — about half of what lower courts have said they should get — under a decision by the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court.

The 5-to-2 decision, rendered on Tuesday, overturned the rulings of two lower courts, which had held that under the state and federal Constitutions, such legal residents could not be denied a higher level of benefits simply because they were not citizens. On narrower grounds, the high court held that the state had no duty to fill in for a federal program that had stopped benefits to most disabled legal immigrants in 1996.

"Calls for U.S. immigration officials to concentrate on deporting more illegal aliens who have serious criminal records are showing results, police say.

A new program at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency -- called Secure Communities -- is netting aliens for deportation when they are arrested for crimes by police in 48 communities, USA Today reported Tuesday.

The program was established in response to criticism of ICE during the Bush administration. Observers said the agency concentrated too much on mass deportations of immigrant workers picked up during raids on work places instead of targeting violent illegal aliens who commit crimes, the newspaper said...."

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a favorite tool of prosecutors in immigration cases, ruling unanimously that a federal identity-theft law may not be used against many illegal workers who used false Social Security numbers to get jobs.

The question in the case was whether workers who use fake identification numbers to commit some other crimes must know they belong to a real person to be subject to a two-year sentence extension for “aggravated identity theft.”

"A former FBI agent and William and Mary student has been sentenced to 12 months in prison after admitting she entered a sham marriage to gain U.S. citizenship more than seven years ago.

Yue Cheng, 26, of Williamsburg was sentenced to a year in prison by Judge Henry Coke Morgan, said Dana J. Boente, acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Cheng pleaded guilty on Dec. 4 to five federal offenses, including marriage fraud and unlawfully claiming U.S. citizenship."

"The Maryland State Board of Education on Tuesday said Frederick County officials are prohibited by federal law from seeking a count of how many illegal immigrants are in the county school system....

"What the Supreme Court says is that you cannot deny the public education. The same Supreme Court decision doesn't talk about [the Board of Education's] ability to provide information," Mr. Jenkins said.

Mr. Jenkins said that if the number of illegal immigrants in the school system were known, taxpayers would know more about where their money is going. He also said that if the head count were taken, the county could ask the federal government to help fund the education of those without legal status"

Massachusetts courts and lawmakers are forcing companies to pay fair wages to illegal aliens.

"Lawyers and advocates say that beyond the unfairness to victims, abuses against immigrants are a threat to American workers, because the practices - common in cleaning, construction, and other industries - could spread to the general workforce during the economic downturn."

"The Bush administration has quietly proposed to overhaul the disciplinary process for lawyers practicing in the nation's immigration courts, aiming to weed out abusive and incompetent ones.

The proposed changes would set new minimum standards of conduct for the attorneys and give judges greater power to punish them...."

"Americans who have demanded better enforcement against illegal immigrants are getting it. Immigration prosecutions are skyrocketing, according to an independent group that analyzes federal data...."