By Rebecca Smith, Staff Attorney & West Coast Coordinator, National Employment Law Project
By now, it goes without saying that the Obama Administration inherited a set of failed immigration enforcement policies and a broken immigration system. In the past several years, newspapers have carried horror stories about workplace raids carried out by immigration agents, in which immigrants arrested for the crime of working without papers have been paraded through court and summarily deported.
Much less ink has been devoted to the ways in which these raids undermined both their specific objective of ensuring compliance with immigration laws, and the equally important goal of enforcing workers' labor rights. Drawing from reported cases, this week the AFL-CIO, American Rights at Work and the National Employment Law Project released a report detailing how, in case after case, employers were able to use the immigration status of their workers as a bludgeon to avoid labor claims.
"Nearly 40 organizations have called on Reid to schedule a vote on Dawn Johnsen," 
Petitioners Joe Sullivan and Terrance Graham were both sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for offenses that did not involve homicide in Florida. Sullivan was 13 years old when he was sentenced to spend the remainder of his natural life in prison. Graham received life without parole for a parole violation at 17 years old. He was sentenced without a trial.
Beginning with the hold on President Obama's nomination for Surgeon General, Senator Reid detailed a number of nominations subject to what one observer called