Oscar-nominated writer-director Chris Weitz is known for making popular fare like American Pie, About a Boy and Twilight: New Moon. But last year he made the independent feature A Better Life, which chronicles an undocumented gardener in East LA. Now he’s turned his talents on four short films about the inhumane anti-immigrant law in Alabama.

At one level, Prouty’s life story—before the FBI targeted a woman who had done so much for the Agency—reads like a classic, exceptional, immigrant success story. But so much of what the government used against her has been used on Muslims and other Arab-Americans without the means to fight back:

Secret evidence
National Security Letters
Threats of deportation (which in her case would have been lethal) and to family members
Border exception searches
Badly managed informants (in this case, Prouty’s own brother)
Trial in the public sphere

I’m not going to get into the drama of Barack Obama’s run-in with Arizona Governor Jan Brewer at the airport. It’s just cable news fodder, so let them handle it. What does interest me is the fact that the biggest sub-group of Arizonans fascinated with the exchange are the Latino community, an indicator of why Obama went to Arizona in the first place.

Democrats see the chance that President Obama’s heated exchange with Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona on the airport tarmac in Phoenix could help him with the Hispanic voters he came West to court this week.

During the debate last night, Mitt Romney offered up the idea of “self-deportation”, which sounds like something you shouldn’t do because you’ll go blind, but which actually just describes the idea of making life completely miserable for immigrants so they’ll give up on America and go home.

The White House announced that Cecilia Muñoz, currently the director of intergovernmental affairs, will become the director of the Domestic Policy Council, replacing Melody Barnes. It’s a strange choice, because she’s caught up in the controversy over the Secure Communities program, which has near-universal condemnation in the Hispanic community.

In potentially good news on the immigration front, the Obama Administration will change the rules for immigrants who apply for legal status. They will allow children and spouses of US citizens applying for legal status to go through the process while staying in the country, rather than the current rule, where the applicant has to leave the country while requesting the waiver.

If you want to understand why the Obama Administration should have some concern about Latino voter turnout in 2012, it’s partly because under his Administration, ICE keeps rounding up American citizens, misidentifying them, and wrongly deporting them.

It’s worth mapping out what will be the biggest stories to chronicle in 2012, what I’ll be looking toward.

While students were on their holiday break, Arizona issued a disturbing wake-up call to anyone who thought the education system had evolved to reflect America’s diversity. In a legal challenge to a controversial law passed in 2010, an administrative law judge pummeled a flagship educational initiative by supporting restrictions on programs based on Latino history and culture.

After posting 1,200 National Guard troops at the US-Mexico border to stop crossings of undocumented immigrants, the Department of Homeland Security will draw down those forces by 75% and shift the mission considerably, including expanded use of unmanned aerial surveillance drones.