Better late than never. Almost seven years after Congress authorized them as part of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Prevention Act, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services released on Sept. 5 guidelines for a batch of new visas, intended for undocumented immigrants who have been crime victims and who are willing to “cooperate with law enforcement in the investigation and prosecution of violent crimes,” the Los Angeles Times reports. “The visas will enable the immigrants to work and live in the U.S. and to apply for permanent residency after three years. Ten thousand ‘U visas‘ will be available each year, along with visas for family members.” The Times reports CIS spokesman Chris Bentley saying the department “plans to publish the U-visa rule in the Federal Register this week, and the rule will take effect 30 days later.” As of press time, however, the rule hadn’t been posted, and we were unsuccessful in trying to fish out a reason why. For resources for potential U-visa applicants, check out www.legalmomentum.org.
In other immigration-related news, the Times also reports that on Sept. 6, “Civil rights lawyers filed 164 more claims against the city of Los Angeles in connection with injuries or emotional harm allegedly suffered when the Police Department broke up a May 1 immigration protest in MacArthur Park,” and that the attorneys plan to file a class-action lawsuit against the city, as well as the Police Department. The daily quotes lawyer Carol Sobel as saying, “We think that there literally are hundreds, if not thousands, of people whose rights were violated that day.”
On May 9, National Lawyers Guild and Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund attorneys filed another class-action lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department on behalf of the immigrant-rights rally’s organizers. According to a National Lawyers Guild press release, the event “was disrupted by the Los Angeles Police Department when riot-gear clad officers swept through the park without warning and ordered everyone leave the park.” The Los Angeles rally was one of dozens planned nationwide, including in Austin, for the second consecutive year.
Last but not least, a Cuero, Texas, rancher found by the side of the road the body of what many people are saying is a chupacabra (literal translation: goat-sucker), a mythical, bloodsucking creature pervasive throughout Latin American and U.S.-Mexico border folklore. For a photo of the fanged, doglike head Phylis Canion has been keeping in her freezer, see www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20539085/wid/11915829. “Canion and some of her neighbors discovered the 40-pound bodies of three of the animals over four days in July outside her ranch in Cuero, 80 miles southeast of San Antonio. Canion said she saved the head of the one she found” for DNA testing and mounting, reports the Associated Press, also noting that local suspicion abounds that “a chupacabra may have killed as many as 26 of her chickens in the past couple of years.”
A veterinarian from nearby Victoria weighs in with a down-to-earth dose of skepticism, however. “I’m not going to tell you that’s not a chupacabra. I just think in my opinion a chupacabra is a dog,” the story quotes Main Street Animal Hospital’s Travis Schaar as saying. “The ‘chupacabras‘ could have all been part of a mutated litter of dogs,” Schaar theorizes, “or they may be a new kind of mutt.”
Download the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Fact Sheet here.
This article appears in September 14 • 2007.