A fight has erupted in Arizona, pitting the state’s governor against a county lawman known as "America's Toughest Sheriff,” and the hunt for illegal immigrants against the hunt for felons on the loose.

According to several reports, Gov. Janet Napolitano has signed an executive order shifting $1.6 million out of the budget for a task force set up to unravel human smuggling networks in the state, and reassigning the money to a new effort to round up tens of thousands of fugitives.

The cutbacks were not shared across Arizona’s 15 counties. Rather, they were aimed at just one county — Maricopa — and its controversial sheriff, Joe Arpaio. MIKE NIZZA for the Lede in The New York Times.

"You can walk to the U.S. border, Francelia Menchaca's immigration lawyer advised her, but don't put your fingers through its fence. It may hinder her immigration paperwork, the lawyer said."

ASHLEY SURDIN in the Washington Post.  [And be sure to watch the slide show.]

Follow this 4-day series on immigration jails by award-winning Washington Post reporters DANA PRIEST and AMY GOLDSTEIN including links to videos, graphics and background documentation.

"The most vulnerable detainees, the physically sick and the mentally ill, are sometimes denied the proper treatment to which they are entitled by law and regulation. They are locked in a world of slow care, poor care and no care, with panic and coverups among employees watching it happen, according to a Post investigation.

The investigation found a hidden world of flawed medical judgments, faulty administrative practices, neglectful guards, ill-trained technicians, sloppy record-keeping, lost medical files and dangerous staff shortages. It is also a world increasingly run by high-priced private contractors. There is evidence that infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and chicken pox, are spreading inside the centers.

Some 83 detainees have died in, or soon after, custody during the past five years. The deaths are the loudest alarms about a system teetering on collapse."

Link to full package.

"[T]he younger children of the mostly immigrant Latinos in Georgia are learning and internalizing that they are different from white--and black--children not just because they have the wrong skin color but also because many of their parents lack the right papers. They are growing up in a racial and political climate in which Latinos' subordinate status in Georgia and in the Deep South bears more than a passing resemblance to that of African-Americans who were living under Jim Crow. Call it Juan Crow: the matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems enabling the physical and psychic isolation needed to control and exploit undocumented immigrants."

ROBERTO LOVATO in The Nation magazine.

"The FBI has withdrawn a secret administrative order seeking the name, address and online activity of a patron of the Internet Archive after the San Francisco-based digital library filed suit to block the action.

It is one of only three known instances in which the FBI has backed off from such a data demand, known as a "national security letter," or NSL, which is not subject to judicial approval and whose recipient is barred from disclosing the order's existence."

ELLEN NAKASHIMA in the Washington Post.

"“The private prison industry was on the verge of bankruptcy in the late 1990s, until the feds bailed them out with the immigration-detention contracts,” said Michele Deitch, an expert on prison privatization with the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin."

LESLIE BERESTEIN in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

According to ICE, 71 people have died in the agency's custody since the beginning of 2004. Of these, 57 were in contract facilities that ranged from private detention centers to county jails, raising questions about whether a lack of government oversight played a part.

Three people have died at Otay Mesa since 2003, including Yusif Osman, 34, a Ghanian man who died in his cell in 2006 after complaining of chest pain.

According to the county medical examiner's report, it took personnel more than an hour to call 911 after Osman's cellmate began asking for help. The report claims that Osman was seen on his knees, and that a medical supervisor, upon finding no medical history on him, “informed the control officer to have Mr. Osman file a request to seek medical assistance.”"

LESLIE BERESTEIN in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

"As the country debates stricter enforcement of immigration laws, thousands of people who are not American citizens are being locked up for days, months or years while the government decides whether to deport them. Some have no valid visa; some are legal residents, but have past criminal convictions; others are seeking asylum from persecution.

Death is a reality in any jail, and the medical neglect of inmates is a perennial issue. But far more than in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees and their families lack basic ways to get answers when things go wrong."

NINA BERNSTEIN in the New York Times.  [See also a related story, a video, a government statement, and the list of deaths in custody.]

AUSTIN, Texas: "For the past 30 years, federal immigration agents have regularly popped in the Travis County Jail and other correctional institutions, combing records and quizzing inmates to identify deportable immigrants and those with criminal records.

But sometime in the future — apparently for the first time ever, and with the blessing of Travis County Sheriff Greg Hamilton — the periodic visits will grow into a permanent presence, as federal agents work around-the-clock in a roughly 8-foot by 10-foot office in the downtown jail.

There, they can question people brought in on any charges — from traffic offenses to murder — about their immigration status. If agents believe someone is in the United States illegally, they can place a "hold" to detain the inmate for possible deportation after the original charges are adjudicated."

JUAN CASTILLO in the Austin American-Statesman.

"On each of the nearly 10,000 days he spent in jail, James Woodard held out hope that someone would believe he was innocent. Some people finally did believe him, but it was 27 years later and they were from an unlikely place: the office of the Dallas County District Attorney, the same entity that railroaded him for the 1980 murder of his girlfriend.

Woodard was freed this past Tuesday and is the longest-serving wrongfully convicted inmate to be released with the help of DNA in U.S. history."

TOM ANDERSON and JENNY DUBIN for CBS News.

The three judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals must decide whether the Board of Immigration Appeals was right to deny asylum to the women and permit them to be returned to Guinea.

At the hearing, the judges seemed particularly upset at a conclusion by the government that it was fair to return the women to Guinea because they could not suffer further persecution since mutilation had already occurred. At times, all three judges raised their voices or cut off lawyers to make a point.

Other asylum cases built on other forms of persecution did not require that the individual seeking asylum prove that the persecution could be repeated, the judges said.

"Supply me any case in which a well-founded fear of persecution was not sustained because the same leg couldn't be amputated or the same organ removed," demanded Judge Rosemary Pooler."

LARRY NEUMEISTER for the Associated Press.

Less than three weeks after a Supreme Court ruling ended a seven-month moratorium on lethal injections, at least 14 execution dates have been set in six states between May 6 and October.

“The Supreme Court essentially blessed their way of doing things,” said Douglas A. Berman, a professor of law and a sentencing expert at Ohio State University. “So in some sense, they’re back from vacation and ready to go to work.”

Experts say the resumption of executions is likely to throw a strong new spotlight on the divisive national — and international — issue of capital punishment. RALPH BLUMENTHAL in The New York Times.

"Thousands of workers waved American flags, marched to mariachi music and rallied for labor and immigrant rights in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday, as May Day gatherings drew light but peaceful crowds.

Turnout across Southern California and the nation was markedly lower than in the last few years, when millions of marchers in more than 100 cities hit the streets on May Day to urge a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and other reforms."

TERESA WATANABE, ANNA GORMAN and ARI B. BLOOMEKATZ (Tony Barboza, Howard Blume, Jessica Garrison, Evelyn Larrubia, Jill Leovy, Rong-Gong Lin II, Robert Lopez, Sam Quinones and Joel Rubin, contributing) in the Los Angeles Times.