CNN has a piece on Speaker of the House Gordon Fox's decision to kill State Representative Peter Palumbo's bill mimicking the controversial Arizona immigration measure. From the piece:

Rhode Island is just the latest of several states where officials are encouraging the enactment of similar laws, said Michael Hethmon general council of the Immigration Reform Law Institute.

As the RI ACLU prepares to hold a news conference today regarding the Wyatt Detention Center and the death of Jason Ng, the Boston Globe reports on how some other prisons, including the nearby Bristol County Jail, have enhanced their revenue by jailing immigrant detainees:

Bristol and other cash-strapped county jails are increasingly embracing the immigration business, capitalizing on the soaring number of foreign-born detainees and the millions of federal dollars a year paid to incarcerate them.

The New York Times continues its strong Rhode Island-based reporting on immigration, using a lengthy front-pager today to highlight the meager returns generated by the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility for its host community of Central Falls, and how the privately managed prison functions as a cog in incarceration's answer to the war on drugs

Some three months after the death of Hiu Lui Ng, a Chinese national, the Rhode Island chapter of the ACLU points to a new court transcript in raising further questions about the case.

Relying on a just-released court transcript, the Rhode Island ACLU charged today that officials at the Wyatt Detention Center were deliberately misleading in their public pronouncements on the death of Hiu Lui Ng, a Chinese national, at their facility in August.

Anchor Rising's Andrew, who made his Phoenix debut last week with a piece on the prospect of making heating oil from algae, nicely captured some of the zeitgeist of last week's Tji page, which features a mini-profile of Joe Bernstein (depicted above).

However, my article may get upstaged by this "Almost Famous" item about someone else familiar to RI blog readers…

A day after Kathy Gregg raised some pertinent questions about state cleaning contracts, the ACLU sends word that it is suing Governor Carcieri over his executive order on immigration:

The Rhode Island ACLU today filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the controversial “immigration executive order” that Governor Donald Carcieri issued in March.

As attention turns to the post-Gustav RNC, I want to put in a word for ProJo op-ed contributor Froma Harrop's work out of the DNC in Denver, in part since I took a poke at her here.

Whether talking about the unmentioned topic of population growth, the necessity of turnout, or looking at Blue Dog Democrats, Harrop touched on some important topics.

The ProJo's Cynthia Needham has a good overview today tracing Governor Carcieri's journey from being the jobs governor to being the anti-illegal immigration governor.

His team disputes any change in focus. Immigration, they say, was always a key priority. But before 2007, Carcieri’s name appeared in The Journal just a handful of times in connection with immigration issues.

Talk radio was yesterday abuzz with this story, with hosts like John DePetro supporting the view that Governor Carcieri's approach to illegal immigration in responsible for a sharp decline in the number of students in Central Falls.

Matt's theory, IMHO, strikes me as closer to the mark:

One word, people: FORECLOSURES.

In separate segments, Colonel Brendan Doherty of the Rhode Island State Police and Dennis Grilli, executive director of AFSCME's Council 94, are the guests this week on WPRI/WNAC-TV's Newsmakers. Tim White fills in as host for the vacationing Steve Aveson, joined by Arlene Violet and myself.

Doherty told me that the different stances between himself and Dean Esserman regarding Governor Carcieri's executive order on immigration have not had an adverse effect on relations between the state police and their counterparts in Providence.

Given Governor Carcieri's steady emphasis on illegal immigrants, it's interesting, isn't it, that it took a chance event to reveal the extent to which undocumented workers were helping to clean state offices?

Tucked into Kathy Gregg's coverage today is the question of whether politics was also at work:

DOCUMENTS PROVIDED by the judiciary list Anthony DeSimone Jr.

After some delay, here's what Governor Carcieri has to say:

The Department of Administration has initiated an internal review of the two companies involved in the recent ICE action, Falcon and Tri-State, to ensure compliance with state and federal employment and immigration laws and contract service levels. The Department is taking all necessary steps to ensure the cleaning and maintenance operations are not disrupted at the buildings contracted to the two companies.

Mary Ann Sorrentino published a piece in the Phoenix in June 2007 that seems rather prescient:

Last July, the Boston Globe found that the Massachusetts State Police employed janitorial crews staffed overwhelmingly with illegal immigrants. The company providing those workers was said to have state contracts worth more than $2 million.

Today's first post of the day concerns -- what else? -- immigration.

A Latina activist who appeared on The John DePetro Show this morning maintained that residents of Central and South America should be identified as "Americans" just as much as denizens of the United States. We're familiar with the argument that we all live in the Americas.

Wags used to say that some day there would be an occasion when there's not a casino story on the front of the ProJo. The topic du jour these day, of course, is immigration.

One colleague makes a good point. The subjects of yesterday's raids were reportedly maintenance workers at six local courthouses -- a situation showing the extent to which these individuals are performing low-level work in our midst, in public institutions.