This story was co-produced by Feet in Two Worlds and El Diario/La Prensa.
NEW ORLEANS — Federal immigration officials have been visiting command centers on the Gulf Coast to check the immigration status of response workers hired by BP and its contractors to clean up the immense oil spill.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Louisiana confirmed that its agents had visited two large command centers—which are staging areas for the response efforts and are sealed off to the public—to verify that the workers there were legal residents.
“We visited just to ensure that people who are legally here can compete for those jobs—those people who are having so many problems,” said Temple H. Black, a spokesman for ICE in Louisiana.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, thousands of Hispanic workers, many of them undocumented, flocked to the region to help in the reconstruction of Louisiana’s coastal towns. Many stayed, building communities on the outskirts of New Orleans or finding employment outside the city in oil refineries and in the fishing industry.
Read full story here.
Propublica Blog: BP’s Spill Plans Had Few Ways to Stop a Blowout
Thursday, June 10th, 2010By Marian Wang and Sasha Chavki
Containment domes, top hats and top kills. By now BP and the government have tried to stop the growing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico with a series of different techniques, each with an odder name than the next.
But where are all these ideas coming from, we’ve wondered. Did BP or the government have plan in place in the event of a blowout?
The answer, so far as we can see: No. None of the documents and plans we’ve been able to find have details on how to deal with a blowout.
Read entire blog here.
Tags:containment domes, Gulf Oil Crisis, PB, U.S. Coast Guard
Posted in Journalism, News/Commentary/Opinion | Comments Closed