Immigrants in a Louisiana detention center began a hunger strike this week to protest the dismal conditions in which they say they are being held.

The detainees’ decision comes in the same week that two new reports –by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC)– showed that the U.S. government continues to violate the rights of detained immigrants –held for breaking civil, not criminal, laws.

The hunger strike is also a response to the Obama administration’s refusal to change the system for inspecting  immigration detention centers that was created during the Bush era and for enforcing minimum standards the government set in 2000. This decision, according to The New York Times, “disappointed and angered immigration advocacy organizations around the country.”

Immigrants at the detention center in Basile, Louisiana, decided to start the protest after reporting “egregious violations to jail staff, immigration officials and advocates,” said the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, which is supporting them. According to About.com’s immigration specialist Jennifer McFadyen, this is the fifth hunger strike in four weeks at the jail.

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While New York immigration advocates demonstrated Wednesday against Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, evidence kept piling up that the U.S. government is violating the rights of immigrants in detention.

Immigrants in some detentions centers in Texas and Arizona are held in “unacceptable conditions,” with their rights to due process “compromised,” concluded a report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which visited the centers just last week.

A separate report released Tuesday by the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), said that “information not available to the public until now reveals substantial and pervasive violations of the government’s own minimum standards for conditions at facilities holding detained immigrants.”

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Less than twelve hours after the results of this weeks’ election were announced, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced Wednesday that Julie Myers, assistant secretary of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is leaving the agency by November 15.

Myers, who has led the agency since 2006, was the controversial face of the Bush administration’s enforcement-focused immigration policy. As Feet In 2 Worlds has reported,  recent large-scale ICE raids have been deeply unpopular, particularly among Latino voters and voters from other immigrant groups, and served to further tarnish the Republican brand. Post election analysis shows that Latinos gave Obama the winning edge in six states, helping to propel him into the White House and adding to Democratic majorities in Congress.

During Myers’ tenure, the agency doubled the number of undocumented immigrants swept up into deportation proceedings to reach a new record of 274,000 sent back to their home countries in 2006. The agency also saw its budget grow exponentially — and used it mostly for enforcement tactics including large-scale immigration raids that largely targeted undocumented workers rather than their employers.

Myers leaves amid speculation that she was the source of the leak to The Associated Press about the status of Obama’s undocumented Kenyan aunt only a few days before the general election. According to Rolling Stone’s Tim Wilkinson, Myers’ precipitous departure the day after the election and less than a week after the information on Obama’s aunt was leaked is likely no coincidence.

Earlier this week, Feet in 2 Worlds reported on how the immigration story of Obama’s family –including his aunt, who continues to live in Boston after her asylum claim was denied last year– reflects the situation of many mixed-status families in the U.S. The news was notable for its timing –the story broke the Friday before the election–as well as for the privileged information it disclosed.

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It looks like the ethnic media’s role and importance only continues to grow – not only for immigrants, but for immigration enforcement agencies as well.

Federal immigration authorities are enlisting ethnic media in their efforts to encourage the nation’s eligible undocumented immigrants to come forward to deport themselves via a new pilot program, ‘Operation Scheduled Departure’, which Feet in 2 Worlds first reported last week.

The Associated Press reported today that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency responsible for enforcing immigration law, is placing ads via ethnic media in many of the five major cities where the program is being piloted: Santa Ana and San Diego, CA; Phoenix; Charlotte, NC; and Chicago. The media outlets running these paid advertisements include major newspapers including La Prensa Hispana in Phoenix. Popular Spanish- and Polish-language radio stations such as WPNA 1490 AM in Chicago were also contacted by ICE to run the ads.

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Could the nation’s undocumented immigrants please stand up? The government will be happy to deport you.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) will encourage the nation’s roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants to voluntarily turn themselves into immigration authorities for deportation in the coming months in an unorthodox new program designed to help the agency combat unauthorized immigration.

ICE Director Julie Myers leaked the new federal effort on Univision this past Sunday at the end of an interview with Jorge Ramos, the anchor of the popular public affairs show ‘Al Punto’ and in advance of an anticipated formal announcement next week.

Entitled ‘Operation Scheduled Departure,’ the still-unannounced program would allow undocumented immigrants without criminal records to turn themselves in at Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices nationwide. In exchange for ‘self-deporting’, the immigrants would be processed and get a few weeks to pack their belongings and get their affairs in order before leaving the country – without being put in a detention facility.

The program does not provide any other incentive for undocumented immigrants to volunteer to leave the country through the program.

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This Thursday, New Haven, Connecticut will mark its one-year anniversary as the first city in the nation to provide identification cards to undocumented immigrants which allow them access to local government services.

Despite harsh criticism and legal challenges the city has issued more than 6,000 Elm City Resident Cards since the program began last summer. Kica Matos, an administrator for New Haven’s Community Development Dept., says that the city has benefited along with immigrants, especially in crime prevention, because immigrants no longer fear that local police will turn them over to federal immigration authorities if they come forward with information about a crime. She has also taken New Haven’s program on the road. Matos just returned from a trip to California, where she advised cities including Los Angeles, on how to create their own identity cards.

Hartford, Connecticut is also considering a proposal that would allow the city to qualify as a so-called “sanctuary city” for undocumented immigrants.

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In a rural Iowa town that was once a bustling model of small-town resurgence, scores of families are left to rely on local food pantries and churches for their meals. Parents have been left to  watch over their children while wearing ankle bracelets but are unable to seek work to provide for them.  The school’s population has been halved, and a gang of minors makes a weekly trip to Cedar Rapids to report to the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency which monitors their status. There’s nothing left to do but wait. Their fate doesn’t rest in their own hands, reports New America Media in a series of articles on the effects of the largest immigration raid in history has had on a local community.

And they are the lucky ones. Nearly 400 workers were arrested and detained in the largest immigration raid in history at Agriprocessors, a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa.  Three-quarters of these workers were hustled through the legal system in a matter of a few weeks — arrested, detained and then allowed to plead guilty to charges they didn’t understand, unaware that they were facing criminal charges and were being sent to prison for sentences averaging five months each. The treatment of these workers lead a long-time court interpreter and college professor, Erik Camayd-Freixas, to break his professional code of silence to report on the abuses that these workers faced in a 12-page essay that made national headlines.  After serving time in jail, largely for identity theft including social security fraud, the workers will be deported back to their home countries, torn apart from their wives or children who are under government supervision in Postville.

For Agriprocessors, however, it’s back to business as usual. After a dip in production and escalating Kosher meat prices (the company produces about 40 percent of the country’s Kosher meat) production is nearly back to normal reports the Jewish Journal. So far only two low-level managers have been charged, despite the government accusing Agriprocessors of paying workers below the federal minimum wage, hiring minors, numerous safety violations and allegations of worker abuse that included a manager duct-taping one workers’ eyes and beating him with a meat hook. The company has also been accused of providing workers with false documentation, such as social security cards, to work at the plant.

There appears to be a stark disparity in the government prosecution of those who work illegally in this country and those who provide them with work despite bombastic claims by ICE officials that employers are no longer safe from prosecution.

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“Our job as journalists is to continue to write about the immigration crisis so it will earn the place it should have among the priorities of the new president.”