<p class="rteleft"><strong>Jefferson Parish leads the nation</strong></p>
<p><span>Secure Communities</span> is a program of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that allows state and local law enforcement to check the fingerprints of a person they have booked into a jail against Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immigration databases. If there is a match with fingerprints in an immigration database, ICE is automatically notified, regardless of whether the person has been convicted of any criminal act.</p>

<p><strong>Barely a year after the massive earthquake that destroyed Port-au-Prince</strong></p>
<p>On January 12, 2010, at 4:53 PM local time southern Haiti was rocked by a massive earthquake that killed over a quarter of a million people, injured more than 300,000, and left 1.5 million Haitians homeless. A year later, the conditions in the country are arguably worse than after the earthquake struck.</p>

<p><strong>National and Gulf South trends reflected in new report</strong></p>
<p>The number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. as of March, 2010, is estimated to be 11,200,000 persons, according to a <a href="http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=133">recent study</a> by the Pew Hispanic Trust. This number is virtually unchanged from 2009, when the first significant decline in unauthorized immigrants in two decades was recorded. Unauthorized immigrants were 3.7 percent of the U.S. population in 2010, and 5.2 percent of the U.S. labor force.</p>