DHS is cheerleading for those businesses that have signed up to use the E-Verify system for checking the immigration status of new hires. There are about 170,000 such employers across the country, and here are a few.

(I’ve tried to get local businesses to talk about E-Verify, to no avail. Is your company/agency using the system? I’m interested to hear about any experiences with the program.)

• American Council on International Personnel (ACIP)


• Cargill Meat Solutions


• Fragomen, Del Ray, Bernsen & Loewy, LLP


• General Dynamics


• H2A Complete LLC


• Hillsborough County


• Hilton Naples


• Immigration and Customs Solutions


• Jackson Lewis LLP


• Keystone Foods


• Marriott International, Inc.


• MASLabor


• North Carolina Growers Association


• Talent Tree, Inc.


• Tyson Foods


• Underwriters Laboratories, Inc.


• University of Utah


• Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

Some context: The 170,000 participants come from a total of 7 million employers in the United States, notes AP.

Was it the Drop Dobbs campaign? An offer from Fox? Something else?

Dobbs’ on-air announcement that he’s leaving CNN is here. The CNN commentator has chosen to move in the direction of opinion and advocacy, reports the NY Times.

NYT’s David Leonhardt cautions that the point is not that Dobbs was controversial, but that he was untruthful. Media Matters is one of the organizations tracking his statements on immigration and other issues.

And here is The Onion’s (definitely untrue) take.

I recently listened to a 92-year-old Jewish refugee describe his escape from Nazi-controlled Austria, his odyssey to America and his decision to enlist in the U.S. Army. Jack Werner, who has lived in Westchester since 1945, is featured in a History Channel series that begins this Sunday, Nov. 15. It’s called “WWII in HD.”

I watched a preview and it was truly gripping. Watching the war in color is chilling, particularly when you’re seeing footage of Nazi soldiers. The era suddenly seems more recent and modern. Black-and-white somehow keeps the history at a safer distance. The NY Times wrote about the sources of the video.

Anyway, Werner appears early in the first episode. I wrote a story about him (click here) for The Journal News, but here I’ll post a transcript of his conversation with me. I spoke to him at his home in Mamaroneck.

Jack Werner: “To get out of Austria was either legal or illegal. And inasmuch as I could not obtain any legal exit, because no country wanted me, including the United States at that time, I decided it was time that I put myself in a position where I do my own immigration. So I packed my backpack, bade my parents farewell, went to the railroad station. It was in August of 1938. Hitler had taken over Austria in March of 1938. So during that time, what you did was go to consulates of any type and description, whether it was Bolivia, or Chile, or Hong Kong, you didn’t care, trying to find out whether they would accept any refugees, or then registering if there was an opportunity to go there.

“The United States had, as you know, a quota for each county. The Austrian country was fortunately merged with the German quota after Hitler took over, so we got advantage of a much larger number of people being allowed to come here. The quota was based on the immigration status of the United States in 1923 or 24, something like that; how many Germans were in this country … So I registered with the American consulate and that was it.

“I took my fate into my own hands, packed my rucksack one fine day and got on a train and traveled overnight from Vienna which is in the eastern part of Austria, to the Swiss border, which is in the western part of Austria. There I got off the train, took out my map, charted myself, how I could cross the mountains … and took a bus from that railroad station into a small valley that led up to the border. And the border was part of the Alps were called the Montfon, that was the name of the mountain. So I climbed up the mountain and was promptly arrested by the border guard.

Big news for Port Chester today. The village now has an official solution to fix its voting rights violation —  and replace an election system  that discriminated against Hispanics.

U.S. District Judge Stephen C. Robinson this morning allowed Port Chester to go ahead with its chosen remedy, a system called cumulative voting. Speaking from the bench in White Plains, he told attorneys from the village and the Justice Department that he was obligated to favor Port Chester’s plan so long as it fixed the voting rights violation in accordance with the law.

This makes for a very interesting situation in Port Chester. The village board elections will look unlike any other in New York state. Cumulative voting will give voters six votes apiece, for six open seats. In a twist, voters will be able to “plump” their votes by putting all six toward the same candidate. This, Port Chester attorneys successfully argued, will allow Latinos to finally see the candidate of their choice make it onto the village board.

Let’s address one common misconception of the bat: This doesn’t technically mean that Hispanics should be able to elect a Hispanic trustee. It means that whichever candidate they rally behind will have a chance of being elected. Under the old system, the judge found, Latinos tended to band together for a certain candidate only to see that person defeated in the villagewide vote.

It will take a lot of work to teach voters the new system — and how to teach minority groups how to strategize under it. For this reason the judge declined to allow a March election, the usual time frame, offering June instead. This will be the first village trustee election in four years.

Anti-Latino hate crimes are prompting action around the New York area, including an  awareness campaign starting up in Rockland County. On Saturday, a vigil will mark the one-year anniversary of the stabbing death of Marcelo Lucero on Long Island. Today, one of seven teen-agers accused in the attack pleaded guilty.

Lucero’s family is collecting money for a memorial scholarship for students at Patchogue-Medford High School, according to a press release, and for the transport of a peace mural to Lucero’s home town of Gualaceo, Ecuador.

The Rockland Immigration Coalition, which marked its 10 anniversary last month, began an anti-hate crime task force in response to a string of incidents. Most recently, three teen-agerswere charged with hate crimes in the robbery of a Hispanic man in Spring Valley. Rockland District Attorney Thomas Zugibe met with the coalition recently to explain what constitutes a hate crime in New York.

Gail Golden, co-chair of the coalition, says the task force wants to work with the education and law enforcement systems to promote awareness.

The two candidates for Putnam County sheriff spoke to the Journal News editorial board today, and spent time debating which of them would work more closely with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Neither one believes that the much publicized 287(g) training — provided by ICE to local officers — is the answer. But both made clear they wanted to work closely with ICE to help identify criminal suspects with a questionable immigration status.

You can see a video of the discussion here by clicking the “on demand” button at the bottom of the Editorial Spotlight video screen.

Before they got onto this issue, Republican Sheriff Don Smith was asked what his department had done to overcome language barriers in Putnam, particularly on the topic of DWI. He responded that the department has worked with a county liaison — Community Affairs Director Patricia Perez — to communicate with Spanish speakers. But that position was eliminated in the recent budget passed by the county legislature. (Unless the position is restored, she will be out by the end of the calendar year.) Smith went on to talk about immigration enforcement.

Democratic challenger Kevin McConville faulted the department for not doing  further outreach to the immigrant population. He said there was not even a single sign in the immigrant enclave of Brewster/Southeast that addressed DWI or other issues, and promised to reach out through church and civic organizations to develop trust between the sheriff’s office and the community.

Neither candidate mentioned, as we reported in July, that the Putnam Sheriff’s Office, an agency with 141 officers, has only two Spanish-speaking deputies. Four Spanish-speakers serve as correction officers.

On the immigration-enforcement question, McConville said he would provide ICE with an office in the Sheriff’s department, so that an ICE agent would be available to work with any law enforcement agency in the county.

Smith said he’d welcome an ICE agent working in the Putnam jail, as in Westchester and Suffolk, but said the volume of work in Putnam wouldn’t justify it.

Smith had been blasted by Republican opponents who favored the 287(g) program. By contrast, McConville noted that the program was faulted by the GAO and others for its lack of standard procedures. The program, now being revamped, is still opposed by advocates out of concern over racial profiling and damaged community relations.

Smith seemed  pleased to agree with McConville on something, saying, “You’re probably my first opponent to recognize that 287(g) was not an effective program.”

(Photos: Sheriff Donald Smith, top, and challenger Kevin McConville. By Robert F. Rodriguez/The Journal News)

I just spotted a Twitter from journalist Pilar Marrero on a commercially sold “illegal alien” costume, available at Target and other outlets. This one includes an orange jumpsuit and a space-alien mask, and a green card. I guess the joke is open to interpretation, but given the serious problems in the immigrant detention system, I wouldn’t expect everyone to laugh.

Reminds me of the scandal two years ago after a Halloween party at ICE, where an employee showed up in dreadlocks, prison stripes and dark makeup and said he was a Jamaican detainee who had escaped. The costume won a prize for most original.

CNN is following up on Hispanic Heritage Month with a “Latino in America” series Oct. 21-22, and some advocacy groups are responding with a pointed message: You can’t have it both ways — You can’t expect us to tune in and still allow Lou Dobbs to spread falsehoods about Latino immigrants on prime time.

America’s Voice and Media Matters plan to run an ad on CNN next week  as part of the Drop Dobbs campaign. It runs through the show’s coverage of conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth, an imaginary North American Union, and a supposed plan for Mexicans to reclaim the American southwest as Aztlan. Media Matters has compiled a fact-check about the show, and its claims about illegal immigrants, here.

The Basta Dobbs campaign is circulating this video by Arturo Perez, which mentions the common claim, echoed locally by New York Assemblyman Greg Ball, that about a third of prisoners are illegal aliens. We fact-checked that claim on the state level here and at the national level here. (The actual percentage is 6 percent if you include all noncitizens, whether legally or illegally present in the United States.)

More than 20 people, including several children, attended an immigration reform vigil in Carmel yesterday. The event coincided with one in Washington D.C. where thousands descended upon the capital calling for a renewed push in reform.

The peaceful Carmel gathering, sponsored  by the Hudson Valley Community Coalition and the lower Hudson Valley chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union, was meant to spark the attention of local representatives to take action. The vigil was held outside the office of Rep. John Hall.

For more on the story, check it out here.

Meanwhile, here are some photos I took of the vigil.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez is scheduled to outline his forthcoming immigration-reform bill tomorrow as part of a rally and vigil tomorrow in D.C.  The Illinois Democrat will be joined by New York Dems including Reps. Nydia Velazquez, Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair, and Yvette Clarke, according to the National Immigration Forum.

Locally, pro-reform advocates are holding a vigil at 5 p.m. in Carmel, Putnam County. It’s sponsored by the Hudson Valley Community Coalition, joined by the New York Civil
Liberties Union, and will be held at the Old County Courthouse, 40 Gleneida Ave.

Part of the message is intended for Democratic Rep. John Hall, whose office is at that site. Families will demonstrate “to show the President and our leaders in Congress such as John Hall that they need to listen and respect our communities, and show us progress on immigration reform,” according the press release from the coalition.

The timing is considered key. Advocates want Congress to take action before the mid-term election cycle. Sarah Thomas Maldonado, an immigration attorney in Scarsdale, NYC and Stamford, Conn., writes, “It is time to stand up for the values of our nation and demand a humane workable immigration system from Congress and the President.”

More from the coalition’s announcement:

Our families and communities are suffering because of the inaction of politicians. Our communities are being demonized and victimized by politicians and talk-show hosts.  The need and moral imperative is urgent. The President and Congressional leaders repeatedly stated that America should not be tearing families apart but should be solving problems. They need to be reminded of their promises.