Laurel, MS — On August 25, 2010, a small group of people gathered to commemorate the second anniversary of a blow to civility, tolerance, justice, and freedom in Laurel, MS.  Two years ago, U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents descended on Howard Industries to rob 595 immigrants and migrant workers of their dignity and separate them from their families without warning or recourse.  For a second consecutive year, MIRA held a vigil for justice to remember those people and families whose lives …

Saturday, August 21, 2010
The American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi (ACLUMS) honored the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA) with its Hero Award today at the ACLUMS’s 41st annual membership meeting.  The ACLU hailed MIRA as Mississippi’s oldest and most vocal advocate for the rights of immigrants.   MIRA will celebrate its 10th anniversary this coming November.
Brent Cox, the ACLUMS Public Education Coordinator, presented the award to MIRA executive director Bill Chandler, legal project director, L. Patricia Ice and MIRA board secretary, the Reverend Jeremy Tobin.  MIRA board member, Andy Guerra, also …

The Associated Press
By Shelia Byrd
August 13, 2010
Mississippi officials conspired to take the infant of an illegal immigrant from Mexico so the girl could be adopted by a white couple, a civil rights group charged Thursday in a federal lawsuit.
The Southern Poverty Law Center said Cirila Baltazar Cruz was separated from her daughter, Ruby, for a year before her child was returned to her in 2009 after the intervention of the group.
Cruz had the baby at Singing River Hospital in Pascagoula in November 2008. Two days after the child was born, …

by Joe Atkins
Originally published by the Clarion Ledger and Atkins’ Labor South blog
SANFORD, N.C. — Getting to the rusted-out trailer that Diego Reyes Sr. and five other Latino workers call home between June and November of each year was no simple task.

I grew up in North Carolina’s tobacco country, but I’d never been here. Taking a right turn off Barbecue Church Road, Reyes and his son Diego Reyes Jr. led me down a rutted, one-way dirt road, past corn fields and bean fields, and …