About Me

My photo
Beverly Hills, California, United States
Eli Kantor is a labor, employment and immigration law attorney. He has been practicing labor, employment and immigration law for more than 36 years. He has been featured in articles about labor, employment and immigration law in the L.A. Times, Business Week.com and Daily Variety. He is a regular columnist for the Daily Journal. Telephone (310)274-8216; eli@elikantorlaw.com. For more information, visit beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com and and beverlyhillsemploymentlaw.com

Translate

Wednesday, April 01, 2015

AFL-CIO launches effort to protect undocumented workers

USA Today: 
By Erin Kelly
March 31, 2015

The AFL-CIO began a nationwide campaign Tuesday to help thousands of undocumented immigrants sign up for President Obama's programs to protect them from deportation and allow them to work legally in the USA.

The massive effort is moving forward despite the fact that two of Obama's three executive actions on immigration have been put on hold because of court challenges.

More than 200 union members from 25 states gathered in a Holiday Inn in Washington for three days of training designed to allow them to return home and begin helping undocumented workers seek legal status.

"If anyone asks you why we're holding this training now, while we wait for a judge to either clear the way or put up another hurdle, tell them this progress can be stalled but it cannot be stopped," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told members of two dozen unions. "We've come this far. We're going forward. We will not be turned back."

Union members will learn how to help people apply for Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that protects immigrants from deportation and allows them to obtain work permits if they came to the U.S. before age 16, have lived here at least five years, are in school, have graduated from high school or served honorably in the U.S. military and do not pose a threat to national security or public safety. That program began in 2012 and is not one of the executive actions that has been stalled by the court challenge.

Two new programs that were scheduled to begin this year — an expansion of DACA and a program to protect the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents — have been put on hold. No applications are currently being accepted by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, but union leaders said they want to be sure that eligible workers know what to do to get ready to apply if the Obama administration wins the court challenge.

"We're going to hold information sessions at union halls to tell people how to get their documents ready and start saving for the processing fees," said Shannon Lederer, director of immigration policy for the AFL-CIO, which represents 56 unions and more than 12.5 million workers. "We know that hundreds of thousands of the workers eligible for these programs are union members. We want the unions to be reliable sources of information for them."

Union members also will help immigrant workers with "green cards" apply to become U.S. citizens, Lederer said.

The Justice Department has asked a federal appeals court to block a judge's order that stopped the president from moving forward with his latest executive actions. Those actions, announced in November, had been scheduled to begin taking effect in February. A hearing has been set for April 17.

U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen, who is based in Brownsville, Texas, issued an injunction in February to temporarily stop Obama's programs. The judge did not rule on the constitutionality of the president's immigration actions but said the case against them had sufficient merit to warrant the injunction. The case was filed by Texas and 25 other states who argued that the president did not have the constitutional authority to take the actions without the approval of Congress.


More than 4 million undocumented immigrants could be eligible under Obama's actions, according to estimates from the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute.

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com

No comments: