By TYCHE HENDRICKS, San Francisco Chronicle

The son of a decorated Vietnam veteran, Hector Veloz is a U.S. citizen, but in 2007 immigration officials mistook him for an illegal immigrant and locked him in an Arizona prison for 13 months.

A University of California-Berkeley student was diagnosed with tuberculosis and university and city health officials spent the weekend tracking down 225 UC-Berkeley students and faculty who had been in close contact with the student.

A voluntary electronic system to verify employees' immigration status, and thus their right to a job, expired Friday but is likely to be reauthorized by Congress as part of a budget bill due to come up for a vote this week.

With the 2010 census a year away and the Obama administration still taking shape, the survey has emerged as a partisan political football.

As the United States awaits the inauguration of its first nonwhite president, organizations representing women, gays and lesbians and people of color are working overtime to encourage President-elect Barack Obama to make good on his remark that he would nominate "one of the most diverse Cabinets and White House staffs of all time."

Key immigration issues facing President-elect Obama:

The nation's economic crisis could make it tough for President-elect Barack Obama to deliver on his pledge to overhaul the nation's immigration laws, some analysts predict.

OAKLAND, Calif. -- When Berkeley, Calif. resident Nancy Kates arrived at Oakland International Airport to board JetBlue flight 472, she thought she was heading off on a routine journey to visit her mother in Boston.Instead she ended up in a standoff with Transportation Safety Administration officials over her bra.

On blogs and around kitchen tables across the country, mixed-race Americans are celebrating the fact that, for the first time, a biracial person, Barack Obama, will be a major party's nominee for president of the United States.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Nearly two months after Cyclone Nargis slammed into Burma's Irrawaddy Delta, humanitarian relief groups are still struggling to get government permission to deliver life-saving aid to 2 million survivors, said Richard Jacquot, a San Francisco resident and emergency program manager for Mercy Corps.