Immigrants

SAN DIEGO - Kathy Gomez estimates that U.S. Border Patrol agents catch 75% of the migrants who try to run through the strawberry fields at her farm near the border with Tijuana. Farther east, Miguel Diaz thinks the number hits 90% at his junkyard near the base of Otay Mountain. But in the San Diego backcountry, rancher Bob Maupin says that, of the migrants who skirt his 250 acres, only 10% get arrested. Across the Southwest, the rate at which the Border Patrol stops illegal crossings has long been the stuff of coffee shop speculation.

SACRAMENTO - California would allow noncitizens to serve on juries under a proposal being considered by state lawmakers, potentially expanding a fundamental obligation of American life to millions more people. The measure, which would apply only to legal residents, would make California the only state to open the jury box to noncitizens who meet all other requirements of service, according to legal experts. The proposal raises the question of what it means to be judged by peers in a state where more than one in seven residents is not a citizen.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. - Aslam Khan, owner of 165 Church's Chicken eateries, still has the text message - a plea from a general manager at one of his restaurants in Indiana: “Please don't fire me. If I lose my job, I lose everything. Please let me stay in the company.” The request had moved Khan so much that he read it aloud to a round table of business executives meeting in Scottsdale this week to discuss their frustrations and concerns about immigration law - and their hope Congress passes some sort of reform to address those worries.

"Work authorization is not meant to get you rich, it's to let you live," said an Egyptian asylum-seeker who fled to the United States after a radical group beat him and tried to kidnap his wife and daughter. After fleeing persecution in their home countries, asylum-seekers like this man in New Jersey face a new type of maltreatment in the United States: The U.S. government won't let them work during what is often a drawn-out asylum process. As a result, vulnerable people who come to this country as their last hope too often end up destitute.

On Monday, the Obama administration announced a new policy to provide legal help to mentally disabled immigrants awaiting deportation trials in federal detention centers. A day later, a federal judge in Los Angeles reached the same conclusion, ruling that the Department of Homeland Security is required to provide free legal assistance to immigrants in detention if they are not capable of representing themselves because of mental illness. Both decisions are welcome and could help bring more fairness to the system.

WASHINGTON -- Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa may be nearing the end of his term, but that isn't keeping him from traveling to the nation's capital to push two of his pet causes - an overhaul of immigration laws that would provide a path to legal status and citizenship for immigrants who are in the country illegally and increased federal funding for transportation projects. Villaraigosa, whose term ends June 30, said again that he would like to be California governor one day. "But the last time I looked, there is somebody in the job," he said during his visit Thursday.

WASHINGTON - House Republicans announced the first in a series of immigration-related bills that would attempt to reshape the system one piece at a time, a contrast with the comprehensive approach the Senate is pursuing. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia, was careful Thursday to say the two bills he would unveil this week - and "several" more after that - were simply starting points for debate. The effort does not preclude the broader overhauls being drafted by bipartisan groups in both chambers, he said.

SACRAMENTO -- Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archbishop Jose Gomez and several other Catholic Church officials in California took time from their retreat in Sacramento on Wednesday to make a push for Congress to keep up the momentum on changes to the country's immigration laws. In a gaggle with reporters, Gomez said reform of the country's immigration laws is “long overdue.” Gomez, who was joined by San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, as well as several bishops from around the state, urged Congress not to delay in passing a bill, saying the bipartisan package of legislation that has come together offers hope for keeping immigrant families together.

David Petraeus, the former four-star general who was forced out as head of the Central Intelligence Agency because he had an affair with his biographer, has accepted a post as a visiting professor in New York. In a statement released Tuesday, Macaulay Honors College at City University of New York said the former commander of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has been named a visiting professor for public policy. He will start Aug. 1. Petraeus, who earned his bachelor of science degree at West Point and has a doctorate from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, has written extensively on international relations, military strategy and national security.

A terrorist attack is like a national Rorschach test. Everybody sees in it what they want - usually something that proves a point they've been making all along. Even before the Tsarnaev brothers were identified as the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombings, speculation about the unknown attackers fell mostly into two camps: They could be Muslim jihadists, or they could be American anti-tax extremists. Guess which suggestion came from liberals and which from conservatives. Once real suspects were identified, pundits and public officials appropriated the bombings to support their worldviews, citing it to support positions on U.S. counter-terrorism policy, immigration reform and even the endless battle over the budget.