Border patrol agents upstate are increasingly arresting New York City undocumented immigrants aboard Amtrak trains and Greyhound buses, raising questions that the government sometimes resorts to racial profiling, immigration advocates and attorneys said.

The arrests have been an authorized practice for decades but seem to have hit a fevered pitch recently, according to advocates.

The patrols have sparked protests in the city as well as upstate, most recently last weekend in Syracuse, where a group said that agents have even targeted U.S. citizens who look "foreign". Immigration attorneys say witnesses have said that agents sometimes question only people of color.

"We are a nation of law, but is their enforcement money better spent going after criminals and youth gangs?" asked the Rev. Brian Jordan, of the Franciscan Immigration Center in Manhattan, who has counseled one Irish and 12 Mexican and Central American undocumented immigrants who were taken off Greyhound buses and Amtrak trains in the past year.

Word of the patrols has broken out in some immigrant communities, and people who have overstayed visas or who never had one are staying off trains.

"Certainly it sent shockwaves through the Irish community," said a Manhattan Irish pub owner, whose bartender was recently deported after Border Patrol agents found him on a bus without identification. "You're not safe anywhere."

this blog posting "Philadelphia Bicycle News: Schuylkill River Trail Map"

has a link to a good detailed google map of the trail, side trails, train stations etc

(CBS/AP) NEWARK New Jersey's gambling mecca will soon be more easily accessible for commuters by rail, but not those living in New Jersey.

Express train service from New York to Atlantic City, scheduled to begin in late 2007 or early 2008, has no planned stops in the Garden State.

Details are being finalized for the new service, dubbed "ACES" for Atlantic City Express Service. But in the current scenario, the trains would run nonstop on the Northeast Corridor tracks from New York to just north of Philadelphia, then head east and continue nonstop to Atlantic City.