Ten undocumented immigrants who were arrested last November for taking part in a civil disobedience action in Alabama to protest the state’s anti-immigrant state law, HB 56, were sentenced yesterday. They pleaded guilty to third-degree disorderly conduct charges, and received suspended five-day jail sentences were fined $50 each and $217 in court costs.

For undocumented immigrant youth activists, engaging in civil disobedience to demand the DREAM Act or to raise awareness about anti-immigrant laws—and then getting arrested for it—is something of a rite of passage. DREAMers get arrested all the time. Their parents, however, are less likely to take part in such bold actions. That is, until Alabama’s HB 56 came along.

The restrictive anti-immigrant law was modeled on Arizona’s SB 1070; HB 56 allowed police officers to stop and question anyone they believed might be undocumented. But Alabama went several steps further, by demanding that schools track the immigration statuses of their students and criminalizing nearly every aspect of daily life for immigrants.

The Associated Press reported Monday that White House grants were used to pay for cars that plainclothes NYPD officers used to conduct surveillance on Muslim neighborhoods and paid for computers that stored even innocuous information about Muslim college students, mosque sermons and social events.

“The news that the federal government is funding New York City’s program to surveil Muslims in the Northeastern United States is not particularly surprising,” said Seth Freed Wessler, Colorlines.com’s investigation reporter.

“It’s been clear that the NYPD draws on federal dollars for its vast domestic anti-terrorism program. It is notable that the funds used for to map and spy on Muslims in New York and surrounding states came directly from the White House and from a drug enforcement program that lacks oversight and accountability. The federal drug war program is being used by the NYPD to expand its reach and power in Muslim communities across the region,” Wessler went on to say.

The Obama administration said Monday it has no control over how the New York Police Department spends millions of dollars in White House grants.

On Tuesday morning ABC announced the upcoming cast of contestants on “Dancing with the Stars”— 6 of the 12 celebrities are people of color.

This upcoming season’s “stars” of color include:

More than 20,000 people have signed a petition to reunite Felipe Montes and his children. Al Jazeera broadcasted his story last week.

Activist, scholar, and author Angela Davis says she is “absolutely” a “supporter of the DREAM Act.

In an interview uploaded three days ago to SoundCould by Derek Washington, Chairman of Stonewall Democrats of S. Nevada, Davis explains why she believes the African-American community has a historical “responsibility” to support the DREAM Act.

“It’s important because it represents one of the most important arenas in the ongoing struggle for civil rights in this country and particularly for those of us who have a history of struggling for civil rights—I’m speaking very specifically about the African-American community—it is our responsibility to support,” Davis said in the interview.

“The DREAM Act is not something we should be struggling about, it should have been taken for granted but it wasn’t so therefore we have to all come together in support of the right of young people to get an education in this country,” Davis went on to say.

Via the excellent Women@NASA series comes this profile of materials scientist QuynhGiao Nguyen. Nguyen’s story is pretty remarkable. While it’s well-documented that women are pushed away from science from the toy aisle onward, Nguyen faced additional barriers — not just as a woman of color, but as an immigrant kid who arrived in an American public school at the age of 7, speaking no English.

“Lakewood Public School System was a huge influence in my life,” says Nguyen in the video. “They really nurtured me and they spent the time in my reading and my writing and my pronunciation skills.”

“I had just as many challenges as any typical American kid would have, and maybe a little bit more. I was sometimes bullied. I was sometimes pushed around. I was told to go back to my own country or people would make fun of my name. I wanted to change my name to Lisa Smith for the longest time. And it wasn’t until I became a US citizen at age eighteen — I had the legal right to change my name at that point in time, and I decided, ‘You know, I’m okay with being QuynhGiao Nguyen. It’s okay.’”

A year later at age 19, Nguyen was offered her first position at NASA as a research intern, and the rest is history (and a lot of hard work). Her passion for her work is infectious, and it’s quite the argument for comprehensive multilingual education in public schools — and for ensuring that women of color have the support they need to counter bias and succeed on their own terms.

Thanks to NASA for understanding the power of immigrant women of color as role models, and thanks to the SPACE SHARES Tumblr for bringing this video to our attention!

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Natalie Portman took the stage at the 84th Annual Academy Awards on Sunday to announce the year’s Best Actor nominees. When she introduced Demián Bichir for his role in “A Better Life,” she identified his character as an “undocumented immigrant”—and not with the pejorative ‘illegal’ term.

Speaking to Bichir, Portman said, “You created so much empathy for another human being that we all left the theater looking at the world differently. As Carlos Galindo, an undocumented immigrant fighting to give his son the opportunities he never had, you made us face very true portrait of a human being no one had ever dared us to consider before.”

“It was very meaningful for Natalie Portman to say ‘undocumented immigrant’ in a room full of people that may be accustomed to hearing the i-word. Whether her own or that of the writers, it was a meaningful choice that shows progress, and it would have been impossible for her to talk about the dignity and depth in Demian Bichir’s portrayal had she used the i-word,” said Mónica L. Novoa, campaign coordinator for the Drop the I-Word Campaign.

A Boston Ben & Jerry’s Scoop Shop has apologized for creating a “Taste the Lin-sanity” frozen yogurt flavor that included lychee honey swirls and crumbled fortune cookies.

“There seemed to be a bit of an initial backlash about it,” Ryan Midden, Ben & Jerry’s general manager for Boston and Cambridge, told Boston.com, “but we obviously weren’t looking to offend anybody and the majority of the feedback about it has been positive.”

Directors Daniel Junge and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy won a Best Documentary Short Oscar for their film “Saving Face” at the 84th annual Academy Awards on Sunday. The film chronicles the arduous attempts of acid-attack survivors Zakia and Rukhsana to bring their assailants to justice, and follows the work of Dr. Mohammad Jawad, a plastic surgeon who strives to help them live a more normal life.

An estimated 22,000 dancers gathered in Mexico City last Sunday to perform a ‘mega-choreography’ dance in honor of the man that created the Spanish-language sitcom “El Chavo del Ocho.” The sitcom follows an orphan played by the show’s creator, Roberto Gómez Bolaños, as he gets into teenage mischief with his neighbors that live in a fictional apartment building.

The first episode of “El Chavo del Ocho” premiered in Mexico on June 20, 1971 and it still syndicated in most Spanish speaking countries including the United States, giving first generation U.S. born Latinos an opportunity to connect to the TV shows their parents watched in their native countries.

Univision’s Jorge Ramos had a heated exchange with Maricopa County, Ariz. Sheriff Joe Arpaio on his show Sunday.

“Now, as you know, to many Latinos, Sheriff Arpaio, you are the face of racism and discrimination. You know that?” Ramos asked Arpaio.

“Well, I’m a pretty nice guy, having lived in Mexico City, South America, Texas and Arizona. I’ve never had any problems with a Latino. They love me,” Arpaio responded, standing in front of one of his jails.

During the opening sequence of the Oscars on Sunday night a blackface-clad Billy Crystal revived his Sammy Davis Jr. impression.

The worst part is the blackface appearance showed up at the same time Justin Bieber made a surprise cameo—perhaps the only moment during the Oscars that could attract a younger audience.

When Octavia Spencer won supporting actress for “The Help,” comedian Paul Scheer tweeted her win “shows just how far we’ve come since Billy Crystal performed in Blackface.”

Actress Viola Davis (L) and actor Julius Tennon arrive at the 84th Annual Academy Awards held at the Hollywood & Highland Center on February 26, 2012 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images)

And as I predicted last week Davis is wearing Vera Wang.

In 2002, Halle Berry became the first African-American actress to win an Academy award for Best Actress but since then all Best Actress winners been white.

“This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It’s for the women that stand beside me - Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett and it’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened,” Berry said in her moving acceptance speech in 2002.

But the “door” that “has been opened” that Berry spoke of has a long way to go. All Best Actress winners since her 2002 win have been white.

And no winner in any acting category during the last ten years has been Latino, Asian American, or Native American, according to a new study titled “Not Quite a Breakthrough: The Oscars and Actors of Color, 2002-2012,” that was sponsored by the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy, UC Berkeley School of Law and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.

Emilio Fernandez

The 8-pound, 24-karat gold plated statues that will be handed out Sunday evening at the 84th Annual Academy Awards were modeled after a Mexican man.

You read that right.

The most recognized trophy in the world known simply as “Oscar” is modeled after Mexican filmmaker and actor Emilio Fernandez.

Solvej Schou on the history of how the statue came to be:

Working in Hollywood, Fernandez befriended Mexican actress Dolores del Rio, then wife of studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s art director and Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences member Cedric Gibbons. Del Rio introduced Fernandez to Gibbons, who was in charge of supervising the statuette’s design.

Gibbons asked Fernandez to pose in the buff for a sketch to create the basis for the 8.5-pound trophy. Reluctantly, Fernandez did, and the design became the foundation for artist George Stanley’s famous sculpture of the statuette, given out at the very first Academy Awards in L.A. in 1929.

That design remains to this day.

The irony of it all is that only two Mexican actors have ever been nominated for an Oscar. This year’s best actor nominee Demián Bichir is the second Mexican (male) actor to be nominated in the 84-year history of the Oscars.

Across all categories only 11 out of 2,809 Oscar trophies have been awarded to Mexicans— and they’re mostly behind the scene awards.

The number of Mexicans in the Academy that gets to vote for who gets Oscars is also pretty low. Only 2% of Academy voters are Latino. Out of 5,100 Academy voters only about 100 are Latino—-which probably leaves you with a dozen or three Mexicans in the mix.

The Librotraficante Caravan is bringing contraband books—or “wet-books”—to Arizona. The project is also intended to raise awareness of the “prohibition” of the Mexican-American Studies Program and the removal of books from classrooms.

“When we heard that Tucson Unified School District administrators not only prohibited Mexican-American Studies, but then walked into classrooms, and in front of young Latino students, during class time, removed and boxed up books by our most beloved authors - that was too much. This offended us down to our soul. We had to respond,” said Tony Diaz, founder of Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say, which has led the charge.

The New York Police Department has secretly been conducting surveillance on Muslims in New Jersey and they have done it with the permission of the governor’s office — granted in 2005 by former Gov. Richard Codey, reports NJ.com.

Current state and local officials say they had no idea the NYPD had been working in New Jersey.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker and the New Jersey State Police both said they were unaware of the operation.

Add this one to the list Jeremy Lin media coverage FAILS.

In a story about Lin “finally having a bad game” and the New York Knicks losing to the Miami Heat, a Yahoo Sports contributor illustrated the story with an image of LeBron James and Yao Ming.

To be fair, they didn’t actually identify Lin or Ming in the photo’s caption. And the story is was written by someone in their contributor network. But really? They needed a picture of an Asian player (that was not Lin) for this story?

On Thursday, Yahoo News published guidelines by the made by Asian American Journalists Association on Jeremy Lin media coverage that everyone should read.