After the Homeland Security Act became law in 2002, INS (now USCIS) was transferred to the Department of Homeland security.  USCIS has provided a list of links with information about the new locations, responsibilities and contacts for the former INS immigration services and immigration enforcement units at http://uscis.gov/graphics/othergov/roadmap.htm.

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Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Ministry has appointed Luis Caberra Cuaron as the new consul general for San Diego.  Caberra, a minister currently assigned to the Mexican Embassy in Washington D.C. will fill the position pending ratification from the Mexican Senate.

Mexico considers the San Diego office the third most important consulate of the 48 in the United States, because it handled 5,000 cases in the past year.  These cases included circumstances such as incarcerated immigrants, children detained at the border trying to enter the country illegally and bodies needing to be returned to Mexico.  The San Diego-Tijuana border has to tackle daily issues such as drug trafficking, increasing commerce and illegal immigrants.

The San Diego consulate is increasing their personnel due to the large Latino population in San Diego County, with a majority of the 75,000 Latinos either Mexican or Mexican-American.  It processes an average of 100 consular identification cards every day.

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After being required to document their immigrant status, more than 200 employees at the T.J. Maxx Distribution Center in Evansville, Indiana, quit their jobs.  The company hired a consultant to check on the immigrant status of workers throughout the corporation, which found discrepancies in the work documentation of 261 workers at the Evansville distribution center.  Employees began leaving T.J. Maxx almost immediately after they were told to document their immigrant status.

Earlier this year, a search of 180 job applications at the T.J. Maxx facility in Pittston Township, Pennsylvania, by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security discovered 90 illegal workers.

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A Medicare bill, which includes a clause that gives hospitals at least $1 billion to hospitals for emergency care to uninsured and undocumented immigrants, has won final congressional approval. Although the legislation calls for the funds to be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis, funding formulas will give preferences to states with significant numbers of undocumented immigrants, including Texas, Arizona and California, where millions of dollars of unpaid medical bills are generated by undocumented immigrants.

This provision in the bill comes after a study was done on the impact of the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act on border-state hospitals.  The study found that hospitals in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas spent $190 million in 2000 on emergency medical treatment for undocumented patients.

Hospitals are required by federal law to care for all patients, regardless of insurance status or citizenship.  The $1 billion will help compensate doctors and ambulance companies that provide immigrant care.

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The day after Thanksgiving, the Department of Homeland Security released a request for proposals to build the new immigration tracking system known as US-VISIT.  The nation’s biggest information technology and engineering companies will vie for the estimated $10 billion contract.

The company hired will serve as the US-VISIT prime contractor and will be responsible for the design and implementation of the system which will be used to collect biometric information such as fingerprints and photographs from the millions of visitors who enter and exit the US each year.

The over 200-page request for proposals was posted on the DHS website (http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/US-VISIT_RFP__HSSCHQ04R0096.pdf).  The DHS has already narrowed the list of potential contractors to teams of three companies.  The winning company will be announced by May 2004.

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The Bush administration has announced that the Transit Without Visa and International to International programs will remain suspended for at least another month.  Due to concerns that potential hijackers would exploit these programs, they were suspended on August 2, 2003 for a period of 60 days so that the government could find ways to make them more secure.  The programs have been suspended for over 120 days as officials continue to assess the programs.

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According to a report done by the Institute of International Education, the number of Middle Eastern students attending colleges and universities fell by 10 percent last this past academic year.  Additionally, declines in new student enrollments from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates were reported from more than one-fourth of the 276 educational institutions surveyed last month.

The institute reported that an increase in the number of students from India, Korea and Kenya offsets the decrease in students from the Middle East, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.  Peggy Blumenthal, vice president of the institute, attributed the decreases to the federal government’s new post-9/11 visa application process, a sluggish world economy and increased competition for students from countries such as the United Kingdom.

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Despite the recent Wal-Mart raids by federal immigration agents, workplace crackdowns of illegal employees are still rare, according to data recently reported by the Associated Press.  This decline is due to a new focus on national security, as fewer employer busts and fewer illegal employees have been arrested since the late 1990s.

The Associated Press analysis of federal immigration data has tracked the drop in workplace enforcement.  The analysis found that there was a 70 percent decline over the past three years in completed employer investigations.  While more than 200,000 businesses are believed to employ undocumented workers, according to the General Accounting Office, only 53 employers were fined in 2002.  In 1998, the equivalent of 344 full-time agents worked on employer investigations, but by 2001 that number had fallen to 124, according to the General Accounting Office.

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The USCIS Texas Service Center, in cooperation with the USCIS Nebraska Service Center, has moved the processing date for preference category I-130s to October 1, 1998 and the processing date for the immediate relative category I-130s to June 25, 2001.

Preference categories include the following: a US citizen filing for an unmarried son/daughter over age 21, a US citizen filing for married son/daughter over age 21, a US citizen filing for brother/sister, a permanent resident filing for spouse or child under age 21 and a permanent resident filing for unmarried son/daughter over age 21.  Immediate relative categories include a US citizen filing for a spouse, parent or child under age 21.