Officials with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency have just announced that they will be conducting at least 1,000 new employer audits.

The audits, basically the Obama administration’s version of immigration raids sans massive arrests and armed government agents, are compounded with the White House’s stated determination to target employers that hire undocumented workers.

Just recently in Minnesota, at least 1,200 janitors were fired from a cleaning company after an audit conducted by ICE found they did not have proper documentation.

Because of this action, thousands more may stand to lose their jobs. It is currently unknown where the audits will take place.

The agency is holding a press briefing this afternoon. Developing….

UPDATE 1PM: From ICE press release: "The 1,000 businesses served with audit notices this week were selected for inspection as a result of investigative leads and intelligence and because of the business’ connection to public safety and national security—for example, privately owned critical infrastructure and key resources. The names and locations of the businesses will not be released at this time due to the ongoing, law enforcement sensitive nature of these audits."

UPDATE 4:45PM: ICE chief John Morton just held a telephone briefing with reporters, and here is some new information Campus Progress has learned:

1. The audits affect businesses in every state in the nation.
2. Morton claims that workplaces critical to national security infrastructure have been targeted, including “power plants,” and the “food industry.”
3. The audits are an effort to “change the national enforcement perspective,” and create a “culture of consequences.”

A Central American factory that was closed after workers unionized will now be reopened, thanks in part to a campaign students organized against Russell Athletic, a large producer of college uniforms and branded merchandize.

The AFL-CIO blog reports:

In what is being hailed as the biggest victory ever by student anti-sweatshop activists, Russell Athletic, the largest supplier of team uniforms and logo-wear, has agreed to reopen a Honduran factory shut down in January shortly after its workers formed a union and will rehire the 1,200 union members.

When Russell shut the factory and moved production to cheaper nonunion plants, United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) mobilized on college and university campuses across the country. Their actions persuaded nearly 100 schools, including Harvard, Michigan, Miami, North Carolina and Stanford universities, to end their agreements with Russell for violating the workers’ rights.

The campaign only goes to show that an elaborate and persistent strategy of targeting factory operators can go a long way in allowing others to organize their workplaces to address their own concerns. So goes the power of international community organizing

Media outlets are reporting that 14 individuals at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) were arrested today at a regents committee meeting debating student fee increases.

The meeting was closed to visitors after repeated outbursts by students and union members.

Protesters chanted outside the building as the university Board of Regents committee voted to boost fees over two years. The full board is scheduled to vote Thursday.

Despite the public outcry, the regents OK’d a 32 percent increase to fees at all university campuses.

The vote comes amid an escalating budget shortfall in the state, totaling $21 billion.

The 2010 census, a decennial survey of momentous proportions that will attempt to count every single person living in the United States, is already being projected to reshape the House of Representatives, thanks to Latinos.

Because House districts in each state are based on census results every ten years, the growing Latino population in the U.S. will be adding at least 7 seats to Congress, according to a report by CQ:

According to the consulting firm Election Data Services Inc., Texas is projected to gain four congressional districts in reapportionment, from 32 to 36, in large part because of burgeoning growth among Hispanics. According to a report from America's Voice, Texas grew its population by nearly 3.5 million since 2000 and by 2.2 million Hispanics, or 63 percent of the total.

…

In Arizona, which is expected to gain two seats (from eight to 10), Hispanics account for nearly half of the 1.4 million residents who have been added to the state population since 2000.

In Florida, which is expected to gain one seat, Hispanics again account for half of the state's population growth of 2.3 million residents since the beginning of the decade. Vargas advocates the creation of a Hispanic-influence district in central Florida, where there is a growing population of Puerto Rican Hispanics.

Whether the additional seats will equal more Latino lawmakers, remains to be seen. As CQ notes, currently only 23 Latinos belong to the 435-member House.

Robert Erickson, the pseudonym for the young man who became an overnight YouTube sensation after rallying Tea Partiers to shout “Columbus Go Home!” at a Minnesota anti-immigration event last week, will allegedly be holding a press conference to announce that he’s deporting himself.

That’s according to a Twitter page that was supposedly created by Erickson.

If true, the move will only build upon the tongue-in-cheek speech that Erickson gave as an orator at the Tea Party rally, that “European immigrants are responsible for the most violent and heinous crimes in the history of the world!”

Here’s the original video:

The press conference may also be taking place at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, or, so reads a tweet by the individual claiming to be Erickson. Stay tuned.

After losing three jobs because of her status as a transgender woman, Diane Schroer, a decorated Army veteran, was finally awarded $491,000 in damages by a federal court last year.

Schroer won the groundbreaking case under sexual discrimination laws, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union.

This week the LGBT advocate traveled to Northern Illinois University, her former school, to educate students about her struggles, and more importantly, why it’s necessary to fight:

After building an impressive resume as a highly decorated Airborne Ranger, and hand-picked to head up a classified national security operation, Schroer pursued a career within the Library of Congress. Upon informing her perspective boss of her transition from David to Diane, Schroer was denied the position.

“I did not feel that the woman who interviewed me had the authority to deny me the position based on the information I had given her, so I contacted the American Civil Liberties Union,” Schroer said. “After a four-and-a-half-year litigation against the federal government, the court ruled that I was in fact discriminated against on the basis of sex.”

Schroer lost three jobs through the course of her transition and is now the owner of her own company, which consults businesses on issues of homeland defense and counter terrorism.

On a related note, Campus Progress reports today that a hearing on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a piece of legislation baring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, has been postponed.

After coming under criticism from a variety of advocacy groups, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agency has rescinded a mandate requiring female immigrants applying for green cards to receive a vaccination against the human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted virus that can cause cervical cancer in women.

The government was criticized because the mandate was seen as unfair. Unlike other shots, HPV vaccinations are not required for U.S. citizens. They can also carry a hefty price, according to the Associated Press:

At a price of $400 to $1,000 for the three-shot series, the vaccine also was an added burden on green card applicants already paying more than a thousand dollars in application fees and hundreds of dollars for mandatory medical exams. Insurance companies do not cover health services required for immigration purposes, advocates pointed out.

"It also put the financial burden on the individual woman and her family," Gabriela Valle, senior director of community outreach and mobilization for California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, said Monday. "Not only are you taking my rights to make an informed decision over my body, over myself, over my daughter, but you're having me pay for it as well."

Despite the changes, the government does recommend all young girls start receiving the HPV vaccination by age 9. Sexually-active women should also be getting the shots too, according to officials.

“Who are you calling an immigrant, Pilgrim?”

Right-leaning activists held an anti-immigration rally in Minnesota over the weekend, but thanks to some creative  Jiu-Jitsu by one speaker, the event took an about-face, without supporters realizing it.

By the end of his speech, a young man going by the moniker “Robert Erickson" gets the tea-partiers to yell a rallying cry of “Columbus Go Home!” over and over again.

Speech nuggets, with the loud crowd cheering throughout the entire event:

All across America they’re contributing to the flood of our job market, making it harder for Americans to find jobs. We’ll I’m fed up and its time to let our politicians know that enough is enough, and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

 

…

 

We need tougher immigration laws to make sure we send these people back where they came from.

 

…

 

It’s no secret that with the invasion of immigrants comes waves of crime. A secret involving massive theft, and murder, and bringing  diseases like small pox, which is responsible for the death of millions of Americans. These aren’t new problems though. They’ve been going on for hundreds of years. They continue to this day. It’s time for us to say enough is enough. Are you with me?

 

…

 

All right. Let’s send these European immigrants back where they came from! I don’t care if they’re Irish, English, or Norwegian. European immigrants are responsible for the most violent and heinous crimes in the history of the world!

 

…

 

Columbus go home! Columbus go home!

After threatening to oppose health care reform legislation if lawmakers continue their push to reduce medication prices, the pharmaceutical industry has now dispensed another bitter pill for the consumer to swallow.

The drug trend is distinctly at odds with the direction of the Consumer Price Index, which has fallen by 1.3 percent in the last year.

Drug makers say they have valid business reasons for the price increases. Critics say the industry is trying to establish a higher price base before Congress passes legislation that tries to curb drug spending in coming years.

“When we have major legislation anticipated, we see a run-up in price increases,” says Stephen W. Schondelmeyer, a professor of pharmaceutical economics at the University of Minnesota. He has analyzed drug pricing for AARP, the advocacy group for seniors that supports the House health care legislation that the drug industry opposes.

Another important fact to note is that since drug patents in the United States can generally last up to 12 years, generic prescriptions, and their lower prices, are still out of reach for those who depend on recently developed drugs.

The pharmaceutical lobby, predominantly represented by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), has supported recent health insurance reform efforts in the past.

But that might change, soon, if lawmakers keep provisions to reduce the prices of medications in a health care reform bill that was approved by the House of Representatives last week.

David Brennan, CEO of the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and board chairman of PhRMA, doesn’t take kindly to the idea of cheaper drugs for consumers, Huffington Post reports:

David Brennan, head of pharma giant AstraZeneca, told the Huffington Post that he was pleased with the White House and the Senate Finance Committee for standing by "the principles which we said are really important." The three parties entered into an agreement, before the health care debate heated up, that saw the pharmaceutical industry committing $80 billion to reform in exchange for various assurances -- the primary one being that the government would not use its purchasing power to negotiate cheaper prescription drug prices.

The House, however, hasn't played by those rules

…

"Right now the answer to that is yes," Brennan said, when asked if the support would change to opposition. "We said there were principles we didn't want to see violated. And if those principles -- price controls, Medicare rebates, moving dual eligibles back from Medicare and back into the Medicaid discount program -- if those things happen, I can't see how we could be supportive of the program."

Meanwhile, UnitedHealth group, the largest health insurance carrier in the country, has been caught spamming its 75,000 employees with E-mail, encouraging workers to call Congress to oppose health care reform in the Senate.

In her first major speech on immigration reform since becoming the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano worked to define the Obama administration’s agenda and what has changed since the issue was debated by Congress in 2007.

Speaking at the Center for American Progress in Washington D.C., Napolitano said her department had met with more than 1,000 groups in an effort to find out what works and what doesn’t when it comes to immigration.

“The businesses, community leaders, labor leaders, faith groups and law enforcement we’ve met with all have different stories, but they all reach the same conclusion: we need reform,” Napolitano said.

Apparently, the White House is favoring a “three-legged stool” approach, as it was called during the speech, which includes a “a commitment to serious and effective enforcement, improved legal flows for families and workers, and a firm but fair way to deal with those who are already here.”

As for what has changed since the failed McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill debated in 2007, Napolitano emphasized the department’s amped up enforcement near the Mexican border—a key part to passing immigration reform according to the Homeland Security chief.

“The immigration debate in 2007 happened during a period of historically high levels of illegal entry into the United States,” said Napolitano. “Because of better enforcement and the current economic circumstances, those numbers have fallen sharply.”

The American Medical Association, the largest doctors’ group in the United States, has passed a resolution calling for the federal government to reclassify marijuana to make it more widely available for medical research:

"Our American Medical Association (AMA) urges that marijuana's status as a federal Schedule I controlled substance be reviewed with the goal of facilitating the conduct of clinical research and development of cannabinoid-based medicines," the AMA's statement (PDF) reads. "This should not be viewed as an endorsement of state-based medical cannabis programs, the legalization of marijuana, or that scientific evidence on the therapeutic use of cannabis meets the current standards for a prescription drug product."

Marijuana is currently classified by the federal government as a "Schedule I" controlled substance, the most restrictive of five categories.

Under current federal guidelines, that means cannabis is considered more dangerous than cocaine and methamphetamine, and because of this, access to the plant for research purposes is cumbersome to say the least.

Under the Obama administration, undocumented workers apparently don’t have to worry about armed immigration officials raiding their workplaces and detaining them for indefinite periods of time, but they do have to worry about losing their jobs.

Recently, at least 1,200 janitors were fired from a cleaning company operating in Minneapolis-St. Paul, according to investigative reporting from Minnesota Public Radio:

One of the largest immigration crackdowns under the Obama administration to date took place in the Twin Cities last month, when 1,200 undocumented janitors were fired from their jobs, according to immigration lawyers.

…

The most important rumor to dispel was that the workers were arrested. Unlike raids at the Swift meatpacking plant in Worthington in 2006, and the Postville, Iowa raid in 2008, the ABM janitors would not be rounded up or arrested.

The union worked with the company and ICE to give employees more time to show proper documents. They had until October. Then, each Monday, another batch of workers who failed to show correct papers was fired.

Following the story, the Service Employees International Union, the body representing the janitors, stated that “instead of solving problems, [the worker purge] only succeeds in pushing undocumented workers away from responsible employers and deeper into the shadows--benefitting the most unscrupulous off-the-books employers and degrading the quality of life for the rest of us.”

Just in time for Veterans’ Day there’s a new lawsuit against KBR, a Texas-based construction company accused of making at least 100,000 soldiers in Iraq sick from contaminated air.

RawStory reports:

At least 22 separate lawsuits claiming KBR poisoned American soldiers in Iraq have been combined into a single massive lawsuit that says KBR, which until not long ago was a subsidiary of Halliburton, sought to save money by disposing of toxic waste and incinerating numerous potentially harmful substances in open-air "burn pits."

According to one of the lawsuits (PDF), filed in a federal court in Nashville, KBR burned "tires, lithium batteries ... biohazard materials (including human corpses), medical supplies (including those used during smallpox inoculations), paints, solvents, asbestos insulation, items containing pesticides, polyvinyl chloride pipes, animal carcasses, dangerous chemicals, and hundreds of thousands of plastic water bottles."

So if it’s not depleted uranium, or Halliburton’s contaminated water, it’s toxic air?

Grievances against KBR range from breathing problems to cancer.

There are also allegations in the article that military officials did little, if anything, to prevent the incineration of materials, and even had KBR burning them in plain site of the soldiers.

While lawmakers labored long hours into the night to pass a major health care reform bill in the House of Represenatives over the weekend, one nonprofit organization has compiled an index of campaign contributions given by insurance interests opposing the legislation.

MAPLight.org, a government transparency group, now has a page where members of the public can see just how much insurance money has been given to their Congressional representatives.

Here are the top 5 and how the lawmakers voted:

• Pomeroy (D-ND)  Yes  $117,179
• Cantor (R-VA )    No    $102,050
• Gerlach (R-PA)    No    $86,925
• Camp (R-MI)      No    $81,823
• Blunt (R-MO)      No    $76,800

The data is based on financial reports from January 2003 to June 2009, and amounts per House member range from $117,179 to $0.

If some of the figures seem arbitrary it’s probably because MAPLight.org is still working on tallying up all remaining contributions that have been reported since September. On top of that, contributions made in October—when the health care reform bill was introduced in the House—have yet to be reported. That will be when the public can see just how much was given by insurance interests to lawmaker coffers, and if that money may have influenced any votes.

White supremacists, spouting racial slurs and donning swastika garb, took their anti-immigrant message to the streets over the weekend, demonstrating in Phoenix, Az., arguably one of the most polarized and turbulent areas in the immigration debate.

In an area home to the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio, accused of countless civil rights violations targeting the city’s large Latino population in a campaign to “crack down” on undocumented immigrants, the small cadre of neo-Nazis made it clear that non-white immigrants and those of Jewish ancestry aren’t welcome in their interpretation of “America.” Approximately two-dozen sympathizers appear to have showed up in Arizona.

“No [inaudible!] No Jews! the Mexicans must go too!” says one demonstrator, in a video provided by The Arizona Republic. “Go back to Mexico, ain't no enchiladas here boy!” says another.

Phoenix looks to have been the largest congregation of the white supremacists, as part of rallies that took place across the country this weekend, according to news reports.

In Minnesota, for instance, only two supporters showed up, although that didn’t stop one of the neo-Nazis from delivering an anti-immigrant speech for an hour.

No doubt the recent appearance of the white supremacists in Phoenix will not be helpful in quelling the growing tensions and fears that have become endemic in the local community, where 30 percent of the inhabitants identify as Latino. 

With the sluggish economy, a number of unemployed craftsmen are apparently hanging out in parking lots and hoping to get some jobs that might traditionally go to undocumented immigrants.

The Las Vegas Sun reports that the spectacle of Anglos seeking work in Home Depot parking lots could be a growing trend:

In the latest sign of the Las Vegas Valley’s economic free fall, U.S. citizens are starting to show up in the early mornings outside home improvement stores and plant nurseries across the Las Vegas Valley, jostling with [undocumented] immigrants for a shot at a few hours of work.

…

Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said he has been seeing the same thing elsewhere. “It’s happening, though still not in massive numbers,” Alvarado said. In the past six months or so, he has heard of “americanos” on the street corners and parking lots of Silver Spring, Md., Long Island, N.Y., and Southern California locations.

“It’s just beginning,” he said. “But I think it’s only going to increase.”

Whether an individual is undocumented, this isn’t exactly the best news for prospective job seekers and those who are just entering the labor market.

Young people will be able to stay on their parents’ health insurance plans until the age of 27 under the Affordable Health Care for America Act, legislation introduced by House members today in Washington D.C.

The health care reform legislation will also include a public option and bar health insurance companies from discriminating against clients on the basis of pre-existing conditions.

“It opens the door to those who have been shut out of the medical system for far too long,” said Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, at a press event held at the Capitol this morning.

Young people 19-24 years old make up the highest percentage of uninsured individuals in the United States, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization specializing in public health studies. The foundation states that 30 percent of the age group did not have coverage in 2007, and that was before the economic recession.

Monique Luse, with the Y.I. Want Change Coalition, a group composed of over 20 youth organizations including Campus Progress, said that she worried over how she would be able to continue to afford health insurance in the volatile job market.

Luse, 27 and diagnosed with hypertension, told reporters she was forced to make difficult financial decisions between paying for medicine and other basic living expenses like transportation, after losing health care coverage when she left Georgetown Law School.

Recent reporting by Campus Progress on a new conservative social networking website has apparently stuck in the craw of another right-leaning group dedicated to exposing “political bias” in education.

In fact, Accuracy In Academia—a sister organization to Accuracy In Media, a longstanding nonprofit that specializes in firing flak against the perils of “liberal media” reporting—even dedicated an entire 950-word article to Campus Progress and myself.

But unfortunately, for a website dedicated to “accuracy,” there are a few distortions and convenient omissions that need to be addressed.

Senator Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said his bill was necessary because banks were raising rates “to squeeze customers” before the remaining provisions of law took effect in February.

The new credit card law, which was passed in May, seeks to stop banks from arbitrarily raising interest rates.

…

Scott Talbott, senior vice president for government affairs at the Financial Service Roundtable, said his organization, which represents large financial institutions, opposed the bill to freeze rates. He said the bill was based on the faulty premise that credit card interest rates were going up because of legislation.