A new report outlines how employers across the country are gaming today’s broken immigration system to exploit immigrant workers and evade both labor and immigration laws. The report by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) uses two dozen case studies—including the recent action at Palermo’s Pizza—as examples of employers’ use of immigration enforcement or the threat of it to retaliate against workers who seek their basic workplace rights.  

Labor activists, comprehensive immigration reform advocates and art aficionados alike turned out last night at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., to meet with Christine Ashley, UNITEHERE! Local 217 member and artist, who was wrongly detained for a month in 2011 upon entering the country from her native Great Britain.

Sarah Seltzer writes for Alternet and other online publications and sends us this.

When a group of longtime food service employees of Pomona College in California—a prominent liberal arts school—lost their jobs due to their immigration status, it got an already tense campus talking. This wasn’t an ordinary firing, or even an unfortunate casualty of the nasty wave of anti-immigration sentiment. To people on campus who had been helping the workers speak up for their rights, it felt like union-busting. The terminated workers had been employed on campus for years, but only after they began a drive toward unionization with UNITEHERE! was their immigration status investigated by the college.

This from Brenda Loya in AFL-CIO Media Affairs.

The AFL-CIO and the National Immigration Forum (NIF) sent a joint letter yesterday to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano stressing the urgent need to change the Secure Communities program.

Jennifer Angarita in AFL-CIO Field Mobilization sends us this report.

From marches to teach-ins, activists across the country have mobilized around the DREAM Act, a common-sense immigration bill for students who were brought to the United States at a young age and who serve in the military or attend college for at least two years. Many have even risked deportation and detention to raise awareness of their cause. Matias Ramos is a prominent DREAM leader and UCLA graduate who was detained last year by ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) while traveling.

The president of the nation’s largest federal employees’ union that represents Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and U.S. marshals today issued the following statement after the Tuesday night ambush of two ICE agents in Mexico, one of whom was killed, and the Wednesday morning shooting in West Virginia that resulted in the killing of one federal marshal and wounding of two other marshals in the line of duty.