National Coalition of Latino Clergy
& Christian Leaders (CONLAMIC)
www.conlamic.org

COMUNICADO DE PRENSA
Para Atencion Inmediata
Contacto: Rev. Miguel Rivera
(202) 615-7444
Julio 23, 2008

"Vigila de Oración"

WASHINGTON, DC- La Coalicion Nacional Latina de Ministros y Lideres Cristianos (CONLAMIC) estara celebrando una "Vigila de Oracion" frente a las oficinas de Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) 425 I Street, NW, Washington DC, el Miercoles 30 de julio a las 3:00pm.

Esta convocatoria de oracion se pide, como protesta por los abusos perpetrados por Policias y Alguaciles, facultados bajo las directrices federales para actuar como Agentes de Inmigracion 287-G.

"El atropello sufrido por Juana Villegas a mano del Policia Timothy Coleman del Berry Hill Police Department, en Nashville TN, es razon para declararnos en contra de la implementacion del programa 287G, pues abre la puerta para la violacion de los derechos humanos, actos intolerables, como este", indica el Rev. Miguel Rivera, Presidente de CONLAMIC.

CONLAMIC, la organizacion mas grande de iglesias evangelicas latinas que representa mas de 16,000 pastores evangelicos esta protestando estas acciones ejecutadas por un Policia y Diacono de una iglesia en Nashville, pidiendo a cientos de pastores y miembros de las iglesias que se den cita en esta gestion de Clamor y Oracion frente a las oficinas de ICE en Washington, DC.

BOLETIN PRESIDENCIAL
Rev. Miguel Rivera
Julio 21, 2008

"Repudiamos el Programa 287G"

Juana Villegas es una razon mas porque hablar
en contra del Programa 287-G

WASHINGTON, DC- Con nueve meses de embarazada esta joven madre mexicana, es detenida por razon de manejar sin licencia de conducir y confinada en prision por razones de su status legal en el pais. (Ver nota de prensa NY Times)

La odisea de Juana, se agrava al encontrarse en medio de la celebracion de su parto, atada con esposas en sus manos y piernas. Solamente fue liberada de los grillos en las piernas, durante el minuto final de expulsar la criatura fuera del utero maternal.

Una vez terminada la labor, en cuestion de segundos fue una encadenada a su camilla y con solo unos minutos, para observar su bebe, recien nacido.

A Juana, se le impidio lactar su hijo, ademas de no poder hablar con su esposo. Inclusive se le impidio retener el dispositivo que permite extraer leche maternal de sus senos, lo que provoco una infeccion en sus glandulas mamarias. Por consecuencia el bebe recien nacido desarrollo una condicion anemica por deficiencia alimenticia.

La decision de todo este abuso y atropello policiaco contra Juana Villegas, descansa en la conciencia (si alguna conciencia queda) del agente de policia local de Nashville, TN, que facultado con autoridad federal, "gracias al plan 287G", extiende la orden de mantener esposada a Juana durante el alumbramiento y peor aun, le niega traer la "bomba de extracion" a su celda, poniendo en peligro la salud de esta joven madre, "indocumentada".

En el pasado, manejar sin licencia de conducir en Tennessee, era simplemente una menor ofensa a la ley de transito. Hoy en dia, es una ofensa criminal, suficiente para detener a Juana y aplicar una gestion federal en su contra que la hace elegible para una deportacion inmediata.

Segun rezan las directrices del Congreso de los Estados Unidos desde el 1986, el conocido plan de trabajo conjunto entre los departamentos de Policia local y la Agencia de Inmigracion, aplica unicamente para remover "criminales violentos" que ademas de ser indocumentados, lastiman con el record de sus fechorias, toda oportunidad de ser aceptados legalmente en este Pais. Sin embargo, lo menos que Juana representa, es ser una "criminal violenta" que amerite ser reprobada y castigada con la deportacion.

Lo mas frustrante de todo este dilema, es la "facilidad que tienen los agentes policiacos que abusan de estas victimas", simplemente por cuanto, "NO HAY LOS RECURSOS PARA INVESTIGAR CADA QUERELLA QUE PUEDA TENER LA APARIENCIA DE VIOLACION A LOS DERECHOS CIVILES O HUMANOS".

Aunque el liderato de ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) asegura que supervisa la ejecucion de las acciones de sus "agentes", sin embargo, investigar las querellas de "atropello y abuso policiaco" es responsabilidad de los departamentos de policia local.

Lograr que una querella radicada pueda ser investigada, se altera cuando los detenidos son removidos de la jurisdiccion donde sufrieron el abuso policial y peor aun, una vez deportados se entiende que los familiares de estos pierden la esperanza de "justicia", pues Policias a Policias por lo general no se motivan a investigarse.

A estos incidentes post-arresto y redadas, tenemos que agregar las "violaciones de perfil racial" que actualmente, son la razon de mayor numero de detenciones, en las carreteras del pais.

Los incidentes de "perfil racial" se hacen notar con mas frecuencia en las ciudades donde el Plan 287-G, actualmente es ejecutado.

La razon para el incremento de esta "gestion criminal", se asume, por razones de "justificar la inversion de fondos en la implementacion de facultar los policias locales con autoridad federal. De hecho, unicamente despues de haber sido entrenados en la Academia Federal y obtener el Certificado de aprobacion, una Ciudad y su Departamento de Policia o Algualciles, pueden comenzar a funcionar como "agentes de inmigracion". Esto obviamente conlleva la inversion de fondos y justifica que todo el proceso sea "efectivo", significando esto "arrestar el mayor numero de indocumentados".

Tal gestion se convierte en el "deporte policial del momento" donde los oficiales de mayor exito, tienen la Prensa a su disposicion y la opinion publica les "vitorea" para que "continue la pesquiza de indocumentados".

Los Agentes Federales de ICE, se "lavan las manos moralmente hablando", pues quienes producen el mayor numero de arrestos y detenidos por "sospecha" de ser indocumentados, son "agentes de policia local, que obviamente quieren exhibir su nueva y exhuberante autoridad federal".

Concluimos pues que, a 287-G, es la herramienta mas injusta, inmoral y sus consecuencias pudieran ser reconocidas eventualmente, como una gestion despiadada, que promueve el abuso policiaco, la discriminacion racial y los abusos que rayan en violacion abierta de derechos humanos.

De hecho, la historia de esta Nacion, siendo un "pais joven" nos confirma que, luego se confrontaran estos incidentes con el canon juridico constitucional apropiado. La pregunta que queda sin contestar es; "cuantas familias tendran que sufrir la separacion de sus seres queridos y el trauma emocional de sus hijos, ademas de la perdida de trabajos, propiedades, inversiones etc, etc...

Sabiendo que aun los candidatos presidenciales mantienen silencio oportuno sobre una Reforma Inmigratoria y el Congreso de los Estados Unidos, claudica sobre el tema por temor a enfrentar la opinion publica constituyente, entendemos pues que nuestra unica alternativa y recurso es... "REPUDIAR Y CONDENAR ENERGICAMENTE LA EJECUCION DEL PLAN 287-G".

Que los Agentes Federales debidamente entrenados y facultados por Ley, realizen su labor de intervenir, detener, investigar y deportar indocumentados, es necesariamente aceptable. NO ASI, TOLERAR EL ATROPELLO DE POLICIAS INEPTOS Y RACISTAS QUE APROVECHAN ESTA GESTION PARA ABUSAR DESPIDADAMENTE.

Durante nuestra Conferencia General del 25 de Septiembre en Washington DC, CONLAMIC dara publicamente a conocer nuestro rechazo contundente al atropello de la 287-G y seremos firmes en lograr que esta gestion termine en nuestras comunidades.

No podemos tolerar ni esperar que otro incidente inhumano y despiadado como el que sufrio Juana Villegas, sea una vez mas publicado. A saber cuantos de estos, han quedado en el anonimato. A ESTO DECIMOS, BASTA YA....!

Press Release - The New York Times
July 20, 2008

Immigrant, Pregnant, Is Jailed Under Pact

Josh Anderson for The New York Times

Juana Villegas and 2-week-old son in her lawyer’s office Thursday in Nashville. Mother and son had been separated for two days.

By JULIA PRESTON
Published: July 20, 2008

It started when Juana Villegas, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was nine months pregnant, was pulled over by a police officer in a Nashville suburb for a routine traffic violation.

By the time Mrs. Villegas was released from the county jail six days later, she had gone through labor with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed most of the time. County officers barred her from seeing or speaking with her husband.

After she was discharged from the hospital, Mrs. Villegas was separated from her nursing infant for two days and barred from taking a breast pump into the jail, her lawyer and a doctor familiar with the case said. Her breasts became infected, and the newborn boy developed jaundice, they said.

Mrs. Villegas’s arrest has focused new attention on a cooperation agreement signed in April 2007 between federal immigration authorities and Davidson County, which shares a consolidated government with Nashville, that gave immigration enforcement powers to county officers. It is one of 57 agreements, known formally as 287G, that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has signed in the last two years with county and local police departments across the country under a rapidly expanding program.

Nashville officials have praised the agreement as a successful partnership between local and federal government.

“We are able to identify and report individuals who are here illegally and have been charged with a criminal offense, while at the same time remaining a friendly and open city to our new legal residents,” Karl Dean, the mayor of Nashville, said in a statement on Friday.

Lawyers and immigrant advocates say Mrs. Villegas’s case shows how local police can exceed their authority when they seek to act on immigration laws they are not fully trained to enforce.

“Had it not been for the 287G program, she would not have been taken down to jail,” said A. Gregory Ramos, a lawyer who is a former president of the Nashville Bar Association. “It was sold as something to make the community safer by taking dangerous criminals off the streets. But it has been operated so broadly that we are getting pregnant women arrested for simple driving offenses, and we’re not getting rid of the robbers and gang members.”

Mrs. Villegas, who is 33, has lived in the United States since 1996, and has three other children besides the newborn who are American citizens because they were born here.

She was stopped on July 3 in her husband’s pickup truck by a police officer from Berry Hill, a Nashville suburb, initially for “careless driving.” After Mrs. Villegas told the officer she did not have a license, he did not issue a ticket but arrested her instead. Elliott Ozment, Mrs. Villegas’s lawyer, said driving without a license is a misdemeanor in Tennessee that police officers generally handle with a citation, not an arrest.

After Mrs. Villegas was taken to the Davidson County jail, a federal immigration agent working there as part of the cooperation agreement conducted a background check. It showed that Mrs. Villegas was an illegal immigrant who had been deported once from the United States in March 1996, Karla Weikal, a spokeswoman for the county sheriff, said. She had no other criminal record.

As a result, immigration agents issued an order to take charge of Mrs. Villegas once she was released by the local authorities. Based on that order, county officers designated her a medium-security inmate in the jail, Ms. Weikal said.

So when Mrs. Villegas went into labor on the night of July 5, she was handcuffed and accompanied by a deputy as she was taken by ambulance to Nashville General Hospital at Meharry. Cuffs chaining her foot to the hospital bed were opened when she reached the final stages of labor, Mrs. Villegas said.

“I felt like they were treating me like a criminal person,” Mrs. Villegas said, speaking in Spanish in a telephone interview. The phone in her room was turned off, and she was not permitted to speak with her husband when he came to retrieve their newborn son from the hospital on July 7 as she returned to jail, she said.

As Mrs. Villegas left the hospital, a nurse offered her a breast pump but a sheriff’s deputy said she could not take it into the jail, Mrs. Villegas said.

Mr. Ozment, the lawyer, said Mrs. Villegas would never have been detained without the 287G cooperation agreement.

“Whether this lady was documented or undocumented should not affect how she was treated in her late pregnant condition and as she was going through labor and bonding with her new baby,” Mr. Ozment said.

On July 8, Mrs. Villegas was taken to court, where she pleaded guilty to driving without a license and was sentenced to time served. Immigration agents immediately released her while a deportation case proceeds, following a policy adopted last year by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to avoid separating babies from nursing mothers.

Ms. Weikal said Mrs. Villegas’s jail stay was prolonged by the Independence Day holiday weekend, when the courts were closed.

“There is a perception that she was treated different from other inmates, and it just is not true,” Ms. Weikal said. “Unfortunately the business of corrections is that families are separated. It’s not pretty, it’s not understandable to a lot of people.”

She said that it was standard procedure to bar medical equipment like a breast pump from the jail.

More than 60,000 illegal immigrants have been identified for deportation since 2006 through 287G cooperation programs, said Richard Rocha, a spokesman for the federal immigration agency. Most of the agreements are aimed at increasing the screening of immigrant convicts serving sentences in local jails, in order to speed their deportation. Some, like Nashville’s, provide for immigration screening right after any foreign-born person is arrested.

Arrests of immigrants have increased rapidly in Tennessee since early 2006, when the state stopped allowing illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, after five years when they had been able to drive legally.


nytimes.com

Press Release - The Providence Journal
July 20, 2008

Advocates want more information on detainees

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, July 20, 2008

By Karen Lee Ziner
Journal Staff Writer

Since the middle of last month, at least 84 suspected illegal immigrants have been arrested throughout Rhode Island, including two highly publicized mass arrests — one at state courthouses last week.

The arrests raise many questions.

Has the federal bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement targeted Rhode Island for a crackdown on illegal immigration? Exactly how many people have been arrested so far this year? Where are they being detained? And, are these stepped-up raids driven by Governor Carcieri’s executive order on illegal immigration?

Unlike other law enforcement agencies that are compelled to release such information, ICE often operates in secret, say lawyers, advocates for freedom of the press and civil libertarians.

Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the Rhode Island raids represent “the same story” as ACLU has experienced in past dealings with ICE.

“Many detainees end up in an impenetrable rabbit hole from Alice in Wonderland,” said Brown. “They are often impossible to find, ICE is often unable to tell family members where they are held — and then, when you finally find them, a chess game begins, where these detainees get transferred to distant places across the country.”

ICE disagrees, insisting that it operates in the open. “Our agency is transparent,” says Paula Grenier, ICE spokeswoman at the Boston regional office. She said families and lawyers can phone to find out detainees’ whereabouts, and detainees have phone access to lawyers and family.

And, she said, ICE “is not targeting Rhode Island for a crackdown.”

“This most recent law enforcement action [at the courthouses] is part of an ongoing criminal investigation,” Grenier said. “And on June 12, we conducted targeted enforcement actions based on intelligence and leads. That operation was specifically targeting fugitive aliens. But we make arrests everywhere in the country every day.”

The recent raids and other arrests in Rhode Island underscore the differing opinions.

First came a two-day federal sweep last month through Aquidneck Island that netted 42 suspected illegal immigrants from Brazil, Guatemala and Mexico, at apartments, stores and other locations.

Then, last Tuesday, state police and ICE agents raided six Rhode Island courthouses, arresting 31 suspected illegal immigrant maintenance workers who worked for two state vendors. Those detainees, from Brazil, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, are facing administrative charges for being in the country illegally. To date, none are charged criminally.

In addition to the big raids, ICE has detained other suspected illegal immigrants during the past few weeks at traffic stops, apartments and other locations.

Lawyers scrambling to locate some of the 19 detainees held after the courthouse raids (12 people were immediately released on humanitarian grounds) reported finding six others at the Bristol County House of Corrections who said they were arrested in Providence in the past few days — but not at the courthouses. Ondine Sniffin, attorney with Catholic Social Services of Fall River, said some of the six detainees said they were arrested at traffic stops.

And four Brazilian men were taken into ICE custody and are expected to be deported following a state police traffic stop on July 9 on Route 4 in North Kingstown.

Critics last week called it “more than coincidental” that the courthouse raids occurred as a governor’s advisory panel, charged with monitoring Carcieri’s new executive order cracking down on illegal immigration, convened for the first time.

Grenier said the recent Rhode Island arrests “are not tied to any initiative by the Rhode Island state governor.”

“ICE is just enforcing the immigration and customs enforcement laws, and we’re going to enforce immigration and customs laws everywhere in the United States.”

Connected or not, the recent arrests underscore what attorneys, civil libertarians and advocates for freedom of the press call a long-standing lack of transparency on the part of ICE.

Lawyers involved in the Rhode Island cases — some of whom assisted detainees from last year’s raid at the Michael Bianco Inc. factory, in New Bedford, in which 362 workers were arrested — say ICE “plays games,” leading to what one lawyer calls “the black hole” into which detainees disappear.

After the courthouse raids last week, an ICE spokesman said the detainees were being held at various regional detention facilities, but refused to specify which ones. He called that “too sensitive a question.”

ICE also does not release names of detainees charged solely with being in the country illegally — as is the case in the courthouse detainees — citing “privacy reasons.”

Overall numbers of arrests are hard to come by as well.

Asked, for example, how many suspected illegal immigrants ICE has arrested and detained since January in Rhode Island, Grenier said, “We don’t capture statistics that way.” She said ICE records those numbers regionally, and by fiscal year.

Lucy Dagleish, executive director of the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press, calls ICE “a particularly troublesome agency.”

“Because they are dealing frequently with illegal immigrants, the government takes the position that the normal rules of government transparency do not apply. They think they can lock them up in secret; not let you know who they’ve got or where they are, or what they did with them, and either keep them jailed or kick them out of the country,” Dagleish said.

“And we as citizens have no way of engaging in oversight of that agency. It is just about the single biggest exception out there to the American notion of justice.”

Dagleish said, “We first discovered how nasty this is going to get right after 9/11, when the feds rounded up 1,200 foreign nationals across the country. Most were Muslim men.”

She said the Reporters’ Committee struck out when it tried to access those names either through freedom of information requests, or through traditional access, by sitting in on court hearings.

“So essentially if you are here illegally, the federal government can swoop you up and take you right off the street and do God knows what to you and the public is never going to know because they don’t have to tell us.”

Grenier disagrees.

“We work with attorneys all the time and those attorneys are provided with information on their client. Families who are searching for their loved ones can call our office of Detention and Removal,” through a toll-free number that can identify the facility in which a detainee is being held. Attorneys may also access clients’ whereabouts through that line, she said.

Grenier said detainees receive handbooks explaining their rights, from telephone privileges, case information, to vending machine locations. She said ICE officers address all matters of concern, and interpreters are available.

Grenier said detainees are allowed free phone calls to any of a list of pro-bono lawyers ICE provides. They are allowed to make outside calls to relatives or friends, but whether those are free depends on the facility, she said.

Grenier also said the ICE Web site — www.ice.gov — provides public information. “We do provide information to those who request it — to the media, attorneys, and other interested stakeholders,” she said.

Alison Foley, a Providence attorney who is among the volunteer lawyers in the courthouse cases, said Friday, “Of the 19 detainees, a group of lawyers have made contact with nine. Four were in the Wyatt Detention Facility [in Central Falls] and five were in the Essex County House of Corrections” in Massachusetts. Of the others, said Foley, “Our understanding was that they were sent to Bristol County [House of Corrections] but we haven’t been able to confirm that any of them are at Bristol County.”

She added, “A lot of the information we have gotten from ICE has been wrong. The number of arrests, for instance. … They told us 31 detained, but we found several more — at least four or five” who had been arrested as part of the courthouse sweeps.

Foley said that information stems from interviews with Wyatt detainees, detainees’ relatives, and coworkers who witnessed some arrests.

Asked on Friday about this disparity, Grenier double-checked with ICE officials, who reiterated that 31 workers had been arrested.

“It has been our experience through our dealings with ICE that they are not generally honest or forthcoming with information, so it wasn’t shocking to us,” said Foley. “They are not at all transparent. We haven’t been able to get straightforward information at all from them.”

The ACLU’s Steven Brown said, “It’s really a terrible situation and inexcusable. It imposes a tremendous burden on family members— obviously it’s difficult for detainees to get legal help for any legal charges against them. It’s terrible, but it routinely happens this way.”

With reports from staff writers Tom Mooney and Jennifer Jordan.

kziner@projo.com

Press Release - The New York Times
July 24, 2008

House Approves Sweeping Effort to Help Housing

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, chairman of the banking committee, left, and Richard C. Shelby, the panel’s senior Republican.

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Published: July 24, 2008

The measure also includes an aggressive plan to help hundreds of thousands of troubled borrowers avoid foreclosure by refinancing their mortgages with more affordable government-insured loans.

The White House, citing an urgent need to restore market confidence in the two mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, said President Bush would sign the measure despite his opposition to the inclusion of nearly $4 billion in grants for local governments to buy and refurbish foreclosed properties.

Mr. Bush’s support assures that the bill will become law after final passage by the Senate, possibly on Saturday. The House approved the bill 272 to 152, with just 45 Republicans joining 227 Democrats voting in favor.

The weak support among House Republicans was remarkable given the president’s position, and suggested an emerging split between Mr. Bush, who is nearing the end of his term, and lawmakers in the House, who are all up for re-election in November.

Republicans said they would not support a bill that puts taxpayer money at risk while potentially bailing out irresponsible borrowers and greedy lenders.

Lawmakers and experts described the legislation as a landmark shift in the government’s role in the housing market, extending a helping hand to both Wall Street and Main Street. They said it would rank in importance with the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to prevent foreclosures in the 1930s as part of the New Deal, and legislation in 1989 responding to the savings and loan crisis.

“We are at a time of considerable turmoil in the private financial markets, and that is a traditional time when government support is needed and called upon,” said Thomas H. Stanton, an author and expert on the mortgage finance industry.

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the banking committee, said: “This is the most important piece of housing legislation in a generation.”

Mr. Dodd appeared at a news conference with Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the committee. They said they expected the Senate to pass the bill with overwhelming support.

Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts and a primary author of the legislation, said troubled homeowners might get relief within days of Mr. Bush signing the bill, because lenders have long known details of the legislation and could move quickly to help borrowers refinance. “Many of these institutions know this is coming,” he said. “I hope they will be able to take advantage of it right away.”

But the legislation, much of which has been debated and fretted over on Capitol Hill for months, also leaves numerous questions unanswered. The biggest unknown is whether the measure will be adequate to slow the downward spiral of home prices and help the economy recover from what many analysts now expect to be a prolonged slowdown.

Perhaps most significantly, the legislation hardens the government’s long-implicit assurance that it would step in to rescue the two mortgage giants who together own or guarantee about $5.2 trillion of the nation’s $12 trillion in mortgages. Currently, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guarantee financing for about 80 percent of new mortgages.

To accommodate a potential rescue for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bill raises the national debt limit to $10.6 trillion, an increase of $800 billion.

The Treasury Department has said it hopes never to use the authority to spend unlimited taxpayer funds — perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars — to maintain the solvency of the mortgage giants because they are in sound financial condition. Still, shares in the two companies rose sharply on Wednesday in a sign of the market’s positive view of having a federal rescue plan in place.

The independent Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday that the rescue plan for the mortgage finance companies should appear on the federal budget as a $25 billion charge in fiscal years 2009 and 2010, but officials conceded that this was only an estimate based on complicated probability calculations.

The budget office said the chances were better than even that a rescue would not be needed before the Treasury Department’s authority to orchestrate a bailout ends at the end of 2009, and the cost to taxpayers would be nothing. But it also said that there was a 5 percent chance that the mortgage giants could lose $100 billion or more, potentially costing taxpayers that much or more.

The bill authorizes the Federal Housing Administration to insure up to $300 billion in refinanced loans for homeowners at risk of foreclosure, aiming to help as many as 400,000 homeowners trade expensive adjustable-rate mortgages for more affordable 30-year fixed-rate loans. To participate, each borrower’s lender must first voluntarily agree to reduce the principal balance of the loan to about 85 percent of each home’s current value. The borrowers must demonstrate the ability to pay the new loan and must also pay a 1.5 percent annual insurance fee to protect the government from future defaults.

The bill creates a permanent affordable housing trust fund that will initially help pay for the mortgage refinancing plan and eventually sponsor the creation of rental housing for Americans too poor to buy homes.

The legislation provides some $15 billion in housing-related tax incentives, including a $7,500 tax credit for first-time home buyers who meet certain income qualifications. And it permanently increases the so-called conforming-loan limit, which typically qualifies mortgages for lower rates, to $625,500 in the nation’s most expensive housing markets.

The bill also grants authority for state and local housing agencies to issue $11 billion in tax-exempt bonds to refinance bad mortgages, calls for stricter oversight of mortgage brokers and sets new disclosure requirements to make loan terms more transparent.

Some experts, including Mr. Stanton, say the new regulator was not given enough authority.

Mr. Bush has long supported tighter regulation of the mortgage giants. But until Wednesday he had threatened to veto the bill over $3.9 billion in grants for local governments, a provision the White House regards as a giveaway.

Mr. Bush set aside those objections on the advice of the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., who told Mr. Bush the overall package was necessary to help stabilize the troubled housing and credit markets, according to the White House press secretary, Dana Perino, who announced the switch Wednesday morning.

She said the gravity of the crisis, and the tight Congressional schedule resulting from the coming summer recess, left no option.

“The president would not have signed this bill if we had a lot of extra time on our hands,” Ms. Perino said. “We don’t.” She said Mr. Bush thought he could have won a veto fight with Congress, but he had concluded “a prolonged veto fight would not be good for the housing industry right now.”