The Center for Public Integrity

The Department of Homeland Security has announced new rules designed to make it easier for thousands of U.S. citizens to legalize undocumented spouses without risking years of separation first. 

The rules—published in the Federal Register Thursday—spell out a policy first announced by President Obama a year ago, in January 2012; the policy is designed to help families avoid the hardship of long separation. However, representatives of those families say thousands of others won’t benefit, and will still face certain exile under a series of little-known but mandatory punishments Congress created in 1996.

Those penalties and their effects on families were the subject of a recent report by the Center for Public Integrity. Thousands of U.S. citizens, many with children, have attempted to legalize spouses only to see them ordered out of the United States for a decade  or more,  as mandated by a 1996 immigration law. As a result, countless couples have chosen not to come forward and attempt to legalize the foreign spouse.

Here is how the current system works, and how the new rule – which takes effect March 4— alters the green-card application process:

Even as Los Angeles authorities continue efforts to reform school-discipline standards, fresh data show that police from the city’s biggest school district are continuing to ticket thousands of young students, especially minorities, at disproportionate rates that critics charge are putting them on a track for dropping out.

Citation rates for this year are little changed from 2011 data. Disclosure of the 2011 data this past spring led to federal civil-rights scrutiny and promises that policies at the Los Angeles Unified School District would be reviewed, and likely changed.

In 2011, children 14 or younger in the school district, the area’s biggest, were issued 43 percent of the nearly 10,200 tickets school police handed out to students for fighting, daytime-curfew violations and other minor infractions — indiscretions that community groups and judges have maintained might better be handled by school officials or referred directly to community-based counseling.

But during the first six months of 2012, even as local juvenile judges’ skepticism about ticketing grew, the share of younger students issued citations increased — to about 48 percent of approximately 4,000 tickets issued, according to a review of the data by the Center for Public Integrity.

After a three-year investigation, authorities in Shelby County, Tenn. signed an agreement Monday with the U.S. Department of Justice to revamp a  juvenile-justice system federal officials said was unduly harsh to black youth, including those accused of minor infractions. 

The agreement will require Shelby, which includes the city of Memphis, to initiate sweeping staff training and changes to improve minors’ defense options, alter court proceedings to guarantee the rights of accused offenders and eliminate detention practices federal officials found dangerous.

In April, federal investigators published a litany of accusations about the Shelby County juvenile-justice system. Investigators alleged that local officials were routinely violating the constitutional rights of youths put into court proceedings and detention. Among the accusations: “cursory” decisions to transfer youths to adult court, inadequate counsel and an adult-court transfer rate for black wards twice that of white wards.

Detention officials also violated their own policies by strapping wards down in restraint chairs for lengthy periods of time and for inappropriate reasons, investigators with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division alleged.  In addition, they said custodians failed to protect wards from “self-injury” and used “dangerous and unconventional pressure point tactics” to subdue youth. 

The so-called “school to prison pipeline” — which has been the subject of several Center for Public Integrity stories —was the focus of new attention on Capitol Hill Wednesday.  Sen. Dick Durbin presided over the first Congressional hearing on schools suspending students and sending them to juvenile-justice authorities for minor discipline problems.

“For many young people, our schools are increasingly a gateway to the criminal justice system,” Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and assistant majority leader, said in his introductory remarks. “This phenomenon is a consequence of a culture of ‘zero tolerance’ that is widespread in our schools and is depriving many children of their fundamental right to an education.”

Durbin said he hoped the hearing, archived here, would highlight the troubling consequences of sending  kids to court and placing them in the juvenile system for relatively minor reasons. He also called on speakers who testified that it’s possible to keep schools safe – and boost kids’ engagement in school – by cutting referrals to the justice system and instead employing counseling and innovative discipline methods.  

The hearing was before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights.

The room was packed with hundreds of community organizers from around the country who are especially concerned about the disproportionate impact that school police citations and arrests are having on African-American and Latino students. Speakers talked of very young students being  handcuffed and arrested for tantrums, or forced to go to court for behavior that used to land them in the principal’s office, or in counseling.

Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali has quietly stepped down following an active four-year tenure devoted to changing attitudes about school discipline and improving access to college-prep classes for minorities.

Ali submitted a sweeping progress report late last month outlining her division’s accomplishents. Her office has focused heavily on investigating allegations of suspensions and expulsions that have disproportionately affected students of color.

The division has also focused on investigating  complaints that some schools fail to place minority students in advanced classes, and do not even offer advanced courses students need to qualify for college.

Ali and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have often argued that cutting suspensions and keeping kids in class is critical to boosting graduation rates and  preparing students to compete in a global economy.

Over the past four years, Ali’s office has received nearly 29,000 complaints of alleged rights violations, a 24 percent increase over the previous four-year period under the administration of George W. Bush.

More than half the complaints were related to treatment of disabled students; about 26 percent were related to race or national origin and another 14 percent were related to gender. 

The report also says that Ali’s office closed some  28,500 complaints through various means, including resolution agreements.

According to the new report, Ali’s office found various examples of discipline inequities.

For example, in one unnamed school, a white student was assigned detention for violating a cell phone policy while a black student with a similar disciplinary history was given a one-day suspension for the same infraction. 

While unveiling an alternative to the DREAM ACT — but with no route to citizenship — Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona suggested that illegal immigrants brought here as children can easily get on a path to citizenship if they marry U.S. citizens. 

However, Kyl’s assumption, expressed at a Capitol press conference Tuesday, is wrong in practical terms.  A recent Center for Public Integrity and KQED public radio report detailed how penalties adopted by Congress in 1996 are ousting undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens for at least a decade, sometimes longer, when they try to obtain legal status based on marriages. 

Thousands of undocumented spouses have already found out the hard way that they may actually be forbidden from living in the United States as the result of their American partners’ efforts to sponsor them for legal permanent residency.

To finish the residency visa process, undocumented spouses must leave the United States and return to their home countries for an in-person interview with U.S. consular officials.  Once they are out of the United States, however, the undocumented spouses are officially told at their interviews that they are barred from re-entering the U.S. as a punishment for entering illegally in the past.  

Thousands of families have been split apart by these penalties, and are suffering severe economic and personal  hardship. Thousands of other couples are now too afraid to come forward to apply for residency as a result.

Marijuana — it’s one of the primary reasons why California experienced a stunning 20 percent drop in juvenile arrests in just one year, between 2010 and 2011, according to provocative new research.

The San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice (CJCJ) recently released a policy briefing with an analysis of arrest data collected by the California Department of Justice’s Criminal Justice Statistics Center. The briefing, “California Youth Crime Plunges to All-Time Low,” identifies a new state marijuana decriminalization law that applies to juveniles, not just adults, as the driving force behind the  plummeting arrest totals.

After the new pot law went into effect in January 2011, simple marijuana possession arrests of California juveniles fell from 14,991 in 2010 to 5,831 in 2011, a 61 percent difference, the report by CJCJ senior research fellow Mike Males found.  

“Arrests for youths for the largest single drug category, marijuana, fell by 9,000 to a level not seen since before the 1980s implementation of the ‘war on drugs,’ ” Males wrote in the report, released in October.  

In November, as Males blogged recently, voters in Washington state and Colorado voted to legalize but regulate marijuana use, like alcohol, for people over 21. California’s 2010 law did not legalize marijuana, but it officially knocked down “simple” possession of less than one ounce to an infraction from a misdemeanor — and it applies to minors, not just people over 21. Police don’t arrest people for infractions; usually, they ticket them. And infractions are punishable not by jail time, but by fines — a $100 fine in California in the case of less than one ounce of pot.

Massachusetts juveniles incarcerated for life without parole will likely wait well into 2013 or beyond for a chance at reduced prison time as lawyers, prosecutors, legislators and advocates carefully craft a strategy to bring the state into compliance with new federal law outlawing the mandatory sentence.

Massachusetts has not been as quick to act as states like North Carolina and Iowa, which have implemented new laws since the U.S. Supreme Court in June banned mandatory juvenile life without parole for murder. While change is expected in Massachusetts, either through the courts or legislation, no clear answers have yet emerged on how to handle new cases and review past convictions involving killers under 18.

Governor Deval Patrick’s point person on the issue wants life without parole banned entirely for juveniles, whether mandatory or not. Middlesex County District Attorney Gerald T. Leone Jr. wants teenage killers to serve a minimum of 35 years before becoming eligible for parole, while the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association has reached no consensus on a solution. Meanwhile, the state’s public defender’s office has mobilized and trained dozens of defense lawyers to potentially work with as many as 80 inmates and accused teen killers in Massachusetts who could be affected by the high court ruling.

The 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Miller v. Alabama banned the mandatory sentence, imposed in 29 states, as “cruel and unusual punishment,” but still gives judges’ discretion to impose life without parole for teen killers.

A new report on solitary confinement of minors includes harrowing descriptions of the psychological and physical impact ‘solitary’ has on young people, as well as surprising revelations about why some authorities resort to isolating juveniles.

In “Growing Up Locked Down,” the groups Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union report that a substantial number of detained juveniles minors are placed in solitary confinement as punishment, or as part of their rehabilitation plans – or even for their own protection. Some custodians, researchers found, say they put juveniles who are in adult lockups into solitary confinement as a way to protect them from attacks by adult inmates.

Some minors interviewed said they were segregated in juvenile facilities for the same reason – to protect them from threats – and let out only for a couple of hours a day.

Released in October, the report is based on research and interviews conducted in local and state detention facilities in Florida, Colorado, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania. Investigators also corresponded with confined minors in 14 other states.

“Because young people are still developing, traumatic experiences like solitary confinement may have a profound effect on their chance to rehabilitate and grow,” researchers said. Minors described experiencing hallucinations, cutting themselves with staples or razors and attempting suicide multiple times. Some said they were denied contact with loved ones while in ‘solitary,’ which increased their depression.

The report also says that a Pennsylvania prison official told researchers that many minors in solitary confinement are prescribed sleeping aids and other medications to help them “cope and reduce anxiety.”

Not every Congressional  Republican is joining the GOP rush to mend fences with Latino voters by  embracing  the pursuit of comprehensive immigration reform.

Rep. Steve King of Iowa, for example — one of Capitol Hill’s  immigration hawks — made it plain after President Obama’s election victory that he doesn’t approve of the chatter from his party’s “establishment” on this issue. “Obama voters chose dependency over Liberty,” King said in a tweet. “Now establishment R's want citizenship for illegals. You can't beat Santa Claus with amnesty.”

King’s attitudes are significant, given that he’s a member of the House Judiciary Committee and vice chairman of its Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement.  Judging from an interaction with one of his constituents, Bethany Gonzalez of Denison, Iowa, King believes in maintaining a hard line, even if U.S. citizens say some immigration policies have turned them into collateral damage.

Gonzalez recently spoke to the Center for Public Integrity about her attempts to persuade King to help her with a life-altering immigration problem. Gonzalez was desperate because immigration penalties she had no idea existed had forced her husband out of the U.S. in 2008, and she and their two children faced prolonged emotional and financial hardship.

King told her she had the option of moving to Mexico.