Local officials in California are going head to head with federal authorities over a program requiring local law enforcement to cooperate with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency's attempts to deport undocumented immigrants.

The Chicago Tribune's Dahleen Glanton reports that Illinois has "bucked a national trend" with an increase in its 2009 illegal immigrant population. A Pew Hispanic Center study finds that they were 525,000 illegal immigrants in Illinois last year compared to 475,000 in 2008. Nationally, the number of illegal immigrants continues to gradually drop -- from 12 million in 2007 to 11 million in 2009. What is interesting about these numbers is how little they have to do with deportation policy under the Bush and Obama administrations.

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has spent the last year dealing with, among other problems, the Supreme Court overturning the city’s gun ban and a media focus on ineffective city law enforcement. However: the Department of Homeland Security absolutely loves the city’s cameras.

The Chicago Tribune’s Alejandro Cancino reports that federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials arrested 370 immigrants in ten Midwestern states the past week. John Morton, the director of ICE, said that 56 percent of those arrested had once been convicted of serious crimes like armed robbery and drug abuse. And nearly all had been convicted of lesser crimes, like driving under the influence. In other words, most immigrants apprehended were guilty of something in addition to the civil offense of being undocumented. The Obama administration has captured illegal immigrants at a higher rate then the Bush administration. But the more salient issue is which immigrants ICE targets.

Is there a difference between an illegal immigrant and an illegal immigrant who has filed papers for residency status?  Immigration raids across the country have rounded up both categories of undocumented workers, and, as Julia Preston reports in the New York Times, Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division has decided there is a difference.  Prosecuting a smaller number of illegal immigrants may help ease a backlog of court cases besetting another Homeland Security department -- Citizen and Immigration Services.  But it's also inciting an ideological debate and tension in the ranks at ICE.

Last week, President Obama pledged federal relief money for Illinois residents with homes damaged or destroyed by floods. The Chicago Tribune Angeline Leventis Lourgos reports an unsettling case where FEMA federal inspectors curiously denied one household flood compensation.

FEMA will spend money on Illinois communities destroyed by flooding, but residents must let the federal government know how much damage was done. The Associated Press reports that 10,000 Illinois residents have applied for FEMA disaster assistance after flooding last month in the West Chicago suburbs. These applications come a week after the Obama administration declared seven Illinois counties -- including Cook County, which contains Chicago -- a federal disaster area. FEMA can help pay for home repairs, temporary housing, unemployment and disaster-related medical and dental payments.

[caption id="attachment_10009" align="alignleft" width="125" caption="Westchester, Illinois"][/caption] FEMA started visiting flooded homes in Chicago's western suburbs like Westchester and Elmhurst yesterday to determine if the area qualifies for federal assistance, reports the Chicago Tribune's Joseph Ruzich.  Cash-strapped Illinois, of course, wants all the financial help it can get to recover from last month's flooding. The best way for a state to get FEMA aid is to prove

The Chicago Tribune has a headline today proclaiming that, according to a Tribune/WGN poll, "Most Chicagoans don't want police to hunt illegal immigrants." That should come as no surprise: Chicago is one of the most pro-immigration spots in the country, with a city hall that has prevented police from checking the immigration status of residents. In fact, what seems more surprising

The Obama administration has deployed the 'BP Squad' of federal investigators to the Gulf to probe whether there was any wrongdoing on the part of government regulators or private companies related to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. As Peter Henning points out in The New York Times, the criminal probe focuses mostly on