(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.

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 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.

“The border guard looked at me and said something like, ‘you want to get across the border to Switzerland?’ I said yes. He said, ‘you better come with me and wait until it gets dark.’”

Jack’s wife, Vera Werner: “That happens to be one of those lucky breaks. Because usually the border guard takes you immediately and calls the Gestapo and you are arrested.”

Jack Werner: “So he took me into his hut, it was very picturesque. It was a small lake and the border was just beyond the lake on the mountain. He took me into the room, and gave me a glass of milk — I must have looked starved or something, and when darkness came he took me to the lake in a little boat, and we crossed the lake. After we arrived at the other shore he said, there you go. ... Up I went, and I climbed and climbed and climbed, and when I finally thought I was on the ridge, and on the other side was Switzerland … I sailed down the mountain. I heard some shots being fired.”

He awoke to find a dog licking him, and a guard brought him to a small village in the valley and put him in jail. His brother in law lived in Zurich, and had given him the name and number of a lawyer. With help from the border guard, Werner boarded a train for Zurich to meet the lawyer. But there were police and military everywhere, and the lawyer said they were sending everyone back.

The lawyer sent him on to Geneva, handing him a train ticket and saying his own brother-in-law was expecting him there. After few days in the brother-in-law’s apartment in Geneva, arrangements were made for him to get across the border into France. “You’ll be picked up tomorrow night and they’ll take you by car,” he was told.

Picking him up were two women, one an employee of the League of Nations, another an American visitor from New York. The French border was teeming with troops, but they made it through a checkpoint. The women took him to the train station and bought him a ticket to Paris, leaving in four hours. Afraid to attract any notice, he left the station and walked around in the dark until it was time to leave. He arrived in Paris the next morning, went to an address he had been given, and found safety in a rented apartment where he lived illegally.

“Somehow, through good luck and through lots of connections I wasn’t announced to police. Police arrested you if you didn’t have proper identification papers and sent you right back…. I had a wonderful time in Paris.

“I made a lot of friends with Americans and learned to speak English well, which was helpful, and finally, in beginning of May, I got a letter from the American consulate in Paris that my quota has been approved and I should come in and pick up my visa. So this is really a sterling day in my life.

“Only one problem, I didn’t have any passport. ... I had a passport, an Austrian passport, with a big ‘J’ on it. But this I threw away, because it was (better to be) stateless than having any kind of documentation.”

Through his connections, he managed to get a document for travel that would allow him passage to the United States with the visa. First, he went to London to meet his parents, who had safely escaped as well.

After landing in New York, he made his way to California. His dream was to be in the movie business.

“It was my dream, I didn’t achieve it,” he said, seven decades later. As he looked ahead to the History Channel series, the irony wasn’t lost on him.

“Now I’m in a movie,” he said.

(Photos: History Channel)

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.)

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.

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.