“This latest incident is proof that we need to do more to enforce our immigration laws,” Brown said in a statement.

David Segundo Dutan Guaman, 23, of 23 Water St., Apt. 1, was arrested early Saturday morning after police say he stabbed a 21-year-old man in the arm.

“It is unacceptable that there are people in the country illegally who are also committing serious crimes and threatening public safety,” Brown said. “It’s time we applied some common sense before more people are hurt or killed.”

Secure Communities is a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement program that facilitates sharing fingerprints and other data between local police and ICE.

Program opponents have worried it may lead to racial profiling or deporting people who are not convicted of serious crimes. They say it could keep immigrants from reporting crimes.

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This story first ran in the Milford Daily News on February 22, 2012.

Brown’s campaign announced it gathered more than 20,000 signatures.

U.S. Senate candidates in Massachusetts need at least 10,000 certified signatures to get on the ballot. The deadline for collecting the signatures is May 8.

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This story first ran in the Associated Press on February 21, 2012.

The volunteers – many of them from the Attleboro area – use to joke that they were “freezin’ for a reason” as they stood on roadsides holding Brown signs during the winter contest.

With a re-election campaign now under way, Brown, R-Mass., is reactivating those volunteers.

The organization showed its strength this weekend, saying it collected 20,000 voter signatures on Brown nomination papers in just a couple of days.

The volunteers stood out at places such as Stop & Shop in Attleboro urging shoppers to sign. Brown attended four of the standouts. Only 10,000 valid signatures are required to qualify for the ballot, and nomination papers are not due until May 8.

With more than enough signatures in hand, Brown said he is now re-directing the troops toward contacting potential supporters and preparing a get-out-the-vote operation for the fall.

“This campaign will be won on the ground, and this weekend’s feat shows my campaign will have the strong grassroots organization necessary to communicate my pro-jobs message and independent record to every voter,” Brown said.

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This story first ran in the Sun on February 21, 2012.

BOSTON - Less than two weeks after nomination papers became available, the Brown campaign flexed its field muscle by announcing today that it collected more than 20,000 signatures this weekend alone to put Scott Brown’s name on the primary ballot. Under state law, United States Senate candidates have until May 8, 2012 to collect 10,000 certified signatures.

Rather than continue to focus on signature collection, the Brown campaign is redirecting its field organization to work on one-on-one voter contact and other important get-out-the-vote efforts.

“I am truly humbled by the outpouring of support from voters across Massachusetts and grateful to the hundreds of volunteers who helped make this extraordinary accomplishment possible,” said Scott Brown. “This campaign will be won on the ground, and this weekend’s feat shows my campaign will have the strong grassroots organization necessary to communicate my pro-jobs message and independent record to every voter.”

Petition signatures must now be turned in and certified by town and city Registrars of Voters before being submitted to the Secretary of the Commonwealth.

Over the weekend, Scott Brown attended signature drives in Northborough, Beverly, Chelmsford, and Attleboro:

Yesterday, she and the more than three dozen other Brown supporters who flocked to the Market Basket in East Gate Plaza, expressed confidence that Brown can again triumph, this time over Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law professor and consumer advocate who is the odds-on favorite to become Brown’s Democratic competition in the November election.

“She is just part and parcel of the political wheel in Washington, D.C., more of the same that got us where we are now,” said Burke. “I like that (Brown) is willing to keep a foot on both sides of the aisle. People need to realize he has been trying to compromise.”

A Suffolk University/7News poll released last week showed Brown with a slight edge over Warren in the early stages of this race, leading by 9 percentage points. The polls also revealed that 64 percent of independents and 49 percent of Democrats think Massachusetts benefits by having both a Democrat and a Republican in the U.S. Senate.

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This story first ran in the Sun on February 19, 2012.

The details of the use of the asset forfeiture fund to purchase a boat for “undercover” surveillance of whale watching off the coast of the Pacific Northwest boggle the mind.

A 35-foot three-engine Boston Whaler Conquest that cost $300,000 was used for “booze cruises,” barbecues, restaurant excursions and family outings stands in contrast to the boats idled, sold or lost to foreclosure by the capricious and overreaching enforcement by NOAA officials.

Sen. Scott Brown, armed with the redacted Inspector General’s report obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request, asked from the Senate floor on Friday, “What does it take to get fired from NOAA?”

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This story first ran in the New Bedford Standard Times on February 19, 2012.

“A lot of the stuff that you hear and see in the TV and the newspapers and all the negativity, it rolls off my back,” Brown says. “When you go through what I’ve gone through, and what people like me have gone through in their lives, you recognize what’s important.”

Brown rebounded from a lot of childhood pain, and he’s also made a career out of comebacks in politics.

In January 2010, he overcame a 31-point deficit in the polls to defeat Democrat Martha Coakley and win the special election to fill the unexpired term of the late U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

Now, Brown, 52, a lawyer, is looking to pull off another surprise in his re-election bid.

As a Republican in Massachusetts, Brown calls himself the underdog in his reelection contest against Democrat Elizabeth Warren, 62. Warren is a Harvard law professor and former adviser to President Barack Obama who helped establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Brown said he is working to be a bipartisan voice in Washington. He said he is probably the most bipartisan member of the state’s congressional delegation.

His approach paid off last month when Obama stopped next to Brown after the president’s “State of the Union” speech and the two agreed to work together on Brown’s bill to ban members and employees of Congress and the executive branch from insider trading. The bill has since been approved in the US House and Senate and the two branches are now resolving minor differences.

In his autobiography, “Against All Odds,” Brown writes about an itinerant childhood marred by violence, destitution and abandonment. He said he expected the book, published in 2011, might shatter some assumptions about him.

“I think people know me through the book more,” Brown said during an interview in late December at Mul’s Diner in South Boston. “A lot of the distortions and misrepresentations are over. That’s one of the reasons I was thankful that it came out. People have an assumption about who I am, what I am and what makes me tick and they couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ll let it speak for itself.”

In the book, which made it to the fourth spot on the New York Times’ best-seller list, Brown wrote about a dark past at a Christian camp on Cape Cod. Brown wrote that he had been molested by a male counselor who followed him into a bathroom while he was attending the camp after the fourth-grade.

Brown’s reporting on the assault inspired other people to step forward and allege they had been victims of sexual assault by staff many years ago at the camp. At least two have filed civil lawsuits against the camp, Camp Good News, located in Sandwich. Brown did not name the camp, but the camp later wrote a letter of apology to him after the book’s release.

“I felt it was important to let people know where I’ve come from and the challenges I’ve gone through,” Brown said when asked why he brought up the sexual abuse. “I wanted to write a good book. I felt if I had an opportunity to speak out, it would maybe help others speak out. As evidenced by what has happened, it’s helped quite a few people and I’m thankful for that.”

Carmen L. Durso, a lawyer in Boston for two people who filed a lawsuit against the camp alleging they were sexually abused by a counselor and for a third client with comparable allegations, and Mitchell Garabedian, a Boston lawyer, both say Brown showed a lot of courage in writing about the charges.

“Sen. Brown’s coming forward has empowered victims and made the world a better place for children,” said Garabedian, who represents eight people with similar allegations against the camp.

Brown’s parents, Judith A. Brown and C. Bruce Brown, a former city councilor in Newburyport, were married and divorced four times and three times each, respectively, the book said. His father left when he was about a year old. His mother struggled with waitress jobs, episodic bouts of binge drinking and domestic violence.

Brown writes that by the time he was 18, he had moved 17 times and lived in a dozen rental homes in communities ringing Boston, including Revere, Wakefield and Malden.

His mother was the daughter of a financially-secure, MIT-educated, electrical engineer for Boston Edison, but she got into some bad marriages.

His first step-father was a beer-drinking, oil truck driver who was so mean that he swiped Brown’s pet kitten off a couch, fatally wounding it. Brown writes that he was just 6 when he awoke one night to shouts, banging and the sight of this step-father repeatedly punching his sobbing mother in their Revere apartment.

“I dived down,” Brown wrote. “His legs were hard and strong, but I grabbed on with both arms and then I opened my mouth and I bit him. I bit him right through his pants as hard as I could. I was like a pit bull and would not let go.”

The family brawl ended when the police arrived. A few months later, the step-father vanished without ever getting to know his infant daughter, Leeann, the only other child of Brown’s mother.

Brown’s second step-father was a bartender who often was absent from their Malden home, leaving the 7-year-old Brown to hang around with older boys.

Brown escaped from a frightening jam one day when a teenage boy lured him into the woods and attempted to force him to perform a sex act at knife point. When the attacker closed his eyes, Brown smashed him in the face with a rock and fled, leaving the older boy howling in pain.

In his book, Brown also wrote about how his wife of 25 years, Gail Huff, faced her own challenges. Huff’s parents divorced and moved out of their house when she was 17, leaving Huff and her sisters behind to basically finish raising themselves, Brown wrote.

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This story first ran in the Republican on February 19, 2012.

Brown discussed a 2011 U.S. Inspector General report that found the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had used money collected from fines paid by fishermen to purchase a more than $300,000 luxury boat.

“It would be bad enough if they had purchased this boat with taxpayer dollars. But they didn’t. They paid for it with money that should belong to our struggling fishermen,” Brown said during his floor speech. “They paid for it out of the fines that fishermen pay into the pot when they mistakenly catch the wrong kind of fish. Those dollars are supposed to stay in fishing communities to help the fishermen.”

Currently, the fines collected for violations under the Magnuson-Stevens Act go into NOAA’s Asset Forfeiture Fund. The Magnuson-Stevens Act is the primary law governing marine fisheries management in federal waters.

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This story first ran in the Springfield Republican on February 17, 2012.

In a speech on the Senate floor, the Massachusetts Republican called on President Obama to fire Jane Lubchenco, the chief administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has jurisdiction of the country’s fishing fleets.

It was the Massachusetts senator’s latest salvo in his longstanding battle against the agency, which has had a contentious relationship with New England fishermen because of what some consider overaggressive enforcement of fishing rules.

“NOAA levied totally unreasonable fines against our fishermen. Then they used that money to buy themselves a luxury boat,’’ Brown said, unveiling an inspector general’s report on the boat.

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This story first ran in the Republican on February 18, 2012.

The Suffolk University/7News poll, which was released late Thursday night, asked 600 likely voters across Massachusetts which candidate they would support in a head-to-head matchup, if the election was held today. The poll has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 4 percentage points.

Forty-nine percent of respondents said they would vote for Brown while 40 percent said they would back Warren, according to the poll.

Separately, 45 percent of respondents said that Brown deserved to be reelected, 39 percent said he did not, and 16 percent were undecided.

The favorable numbers for Brown — who stunned political observers in 2010 by winning a special election to fill the seat of the late senator Edward M. Kennedy — come after a University of Massachusetts Lowell/Boston Herald poll in December showed a 7-point lead for Warren, a consumer advocate and Harvard Law professor.

Brown had a 52 percent favorability rating among respondents in the new Suffolk poll, compared to 35 percent who viewed Warren favorably.

Twenty-eight percent had a negative view of Brown, 17 percent were undecided, and just 3 percent had never heard of the incumbent.

Warren could be closing the name-recognition gap, according to the poll. Thirteen percent of respondents said they had never heard of her, compared to 29 percent in a separate UMass Lowell/Boston Herald poll released last week.

Twenty-eight percent viewed her unfavorably in the Suffolk poll and 24 percent were undecided.

Asked for the first word or phrase that came to mind when they heard Brown’s name, the two most frequent responses were ‘‘Republican,’’ at 8 percent and ‘‘independent’’ at 4 percent.

Responses generating 2 percent each included ‘‘pick-up truck,’’ ‘‘moderate,’’ ‘‘dependable,’’ ‘‘good guy/good man,’’ ‘‘handsome,’’ ‘‘hard worker,’’ ‘‘honest,’’ ‘‘senator,’’ ‘‘deceiver/deceitful,’’ ‘‘politician,’’ and ‘‘doing a good job.’’

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This story first ran in the Boston Globe on February 17, 2012.