CA Inmate Firefighting Unit has Included Violent Inmates for Years:  Two days after the AP reported that California corrections officials were considering expanding the criteria for inmate firefighters to include inmates with violent backgrounds, and one day after the AP reported that expansion would no longer be considered, corrections officials admitted Wednesday that 40 percent of the state's inmate firefighting crew have previous convictions for violent offenses.  The AP reports that corrections spokesman Jeffrey Callison says inmates with violent histories have been serving on the unit since the 1990s, and claims that the corrections department provided inaccurate information to the AP earlier this week because of "differing definitions of what constitutes a violent background."  As of September 30, 1,441 of the 3,732 inmate firefighters had committed a crime deemed violent under the California penal code.  Mike Lopez, president of the union representing state firefighters, has called for a full investigation.

Chaos in Immigration Courts:  Adult illegal immigrants currently wait an average of 1,071days (about three years) to receive a deportation hearing due to immigration courts being overly clogged by the surge of minors that flooded over the U.S.-Mexico border beginning last year.  Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner reports that according to the report published by the Migration Policy Institute, between the start of the spring 2014 surge and now, approximately 102,000 unaccompanied children from Central America and Mexico were arrested at the border, though a staggering 61 percent of cases involving minors were still unresolved as of August 31.  Further, 86 percent, or 1 in 6, minors ordered deported fail to show up for legal hearings, leaving most deportation orders unexecuted.  In fiscal year 2014, 13,204 minors were ordered removed, but only 1,863 were actually deported.