The American Immigration Lawyers Association has released a report on DHS immigration enforcement efforts (via The Economist), arguing that the tools DHS is using to reduce illegal immigration conflict with its stated priorities of focusing on undocumented immigrants who are a threat to public safety. Essentially, their argument is that the use of programs like Secure Communities, which mandates local law enforcement in covered jurisdictions forward the identifying information of anyone they arrest to ICE, ensures that "prioritization" can't happen.

John McWhorter offers a contrarian take on the civil rights era drama The Help, arguing that its critics are overreacting. Not content simply to make the case that the film is compelling, he goes onto argue that its critics are actually racist:

This is a “feel-good movie for a cowardly nation”? How could it be that this film, hardly The Sorrow and the Pity but honest and thoroughly affecting, is being treated like a remake of Imitation of Life?

The Prospect's Jerusalem correspondent Gershom Gorenberg sent me a note in response to my recidivism and unemployment post earlier:

The folks who brought you the now-discredited charges behind the New Black Panther voter intimidation case are busy trying to prove that the Justice Department is deeply politicized because it's hiring people with experience in civil rights organizations to work in the civil rights division, as opposed to establishing an illegal Republican litmus test like when Bush was in office.

Matt Gertz flags this assertion from NBPP hype man J. Christian Adams about a recent DoJ hire, Tamica Daniel.

Trymaine Lee has a fascinating story on the role Americans for Prosperity played in dismantling a school desegregation program in North Carolina:

Since 2000, Wake County has used a system of integration based on income. Under this program, no more than 40 percent of any school’s students could receive subsidized lunches, a proxy for determining the level of poverty. The school district is the 18th largest in the country, and includes Raleigh, its surrounding suburbs and rural areas. It became one of the first school systems in the nation to adopt such a plan.

Robert Chesney, looking at the trial of Mahamud Said Omar, a Minnesota resident who is accused of aiding Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab, cites it as an example of a case in which military commissions simply can't be used: