Immigration activists organized a national action day on August 16 to demand an end to Secure Communities, the immigration enforcement program that the Obama administration plans to deploy nationwide by 2013.

COA's Eric Farnsworth says that, besides the U.S.-Mexican trucking agreement reached in July 2011, the White House has done "little in terms of direct promotion of economic development in Mexico," with a sharp increase of federal funding directed to law enforcement on the border only helping indirectly.

With no replacement named, Arturo Valenzuela leaves his post as assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere to return to Georgetown University.

"Several members of the Council of the Americas Trade Advisory Group are pressing for 'swift approval' of all three pending free trade agreements and a way forward on a worker-aid program that is tying up passage," writes The Hill of a COA op-ed published in the The Washington Post.

"Every day we delay, U.S. market share in [Colombia, Panama, and South Korea] is being eroded by others who are able to trade under more favorable terms," writes COA's Eric Farnsworth in Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Both the administration and congressional Republicans must end the partisan wrangling over the Trade Adjustment Assistance program to pass pending U.S. trade pacts, write members of COA's Trade Advisory Group in The Washington Post.

The courts alone won’t beat new, regressive legislation in these two states. Without a broader response such copycat of Arizona’s SB 1070 will continue to spread.