DHS recently announced that it would spend $25.5 million on additional security measures along the border; the money will be allocated to states as part of the Border Interoperability Demonstration Project (BIDP) which is designed as a one-time competitive grant program to develop innovative solutions that improve emergency communications for first responders and law enforcement agents; seven states including California, Maine, and Texas will receive grants

DHS announced $25.5 million in grant funding under the Border Interoperability Demonstration Project (BIDP) — a one-time competitive grant program focused on developing solutions to strengthen interoperable emergency communications along the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico

In February 2009 President Obama said that “More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our border”; the president was right that most of the weapons used in the war among the cartels — and between the cartels and the Mexican government — come from the United States, but it now appears that they do not come from gun shows or mom and pop gun stores; rather, these weapons — many of them not even sold in guns stores — come from the U.S. government; the United States sells hundreds of millions of dollars worth of firearms to the Mexican government and the countries in Central America; corrupt officials in these countries prefer to sell these weapons to the Mexican cartels for a tidy profit rather than keep these weapons in their own armories and reserves

Despite not having a clearly defined conception of what security along the border should look like, the government has spent billions of dollars each year causing some to begin wondering what metrics can be used to define success for these various programs; as Congress battles to find cost savings and cut ineffective programs, it will become increasingly critical to have clear assessments of the efficacy of large expenditures like border security programs; Border Patrol is expected to begin trials with new metrics in October of this year and GAO indicates that these new metrics will help Border Patrol become more cost effective

A sheriff in Arizona has accused U.S. Border Patrol officials of instructing local law enforcement officers to stop arresting immigrants illegally entering the United States along its southern border; the sheriff says he had been instructed by federal officials to not arrest immigrants crossing illegally because they wanted to reduce figures for the number of apprehensions at the border; DHS Secretary Napolitano recently cited a reduction of apprehensions along the border as evidence that the border was more secure than ever; U.S. Border Patrol officials staunchly denied these claims

Drug smugglers along the U.S.-Mexico border are relying on increasingly more innovative ways to bypass additional security measures deployed along the southern border; law enforcement officials recently discovered a mobile folding ramp that allowed vehicles to drive over the border fence; the portable ramp was found in the Barry M. Goldwater Range east of Yuma, Arizona as Border Patrol agents chased a vehicle that had just used the ramp to leap over the fence with 1,000 pounds of marijuana

The number of bodies found in mass graves in north-eastern Mexico over the past week has risen to 88, after 16 more corpses were discovered; the graves are the largest concentration ever found in one area in Mexico; a gang member who participated in the killing told police that most of the victims were travelling through the area on buses; the motive for the killings remains unclear; the graves resemble the discovery last August of the bodies of seventy-two Central and South American migrants, who were killed in the same town for refusing to join the ranks of the cartel which had abducted them

After spending nearly $1 billion dollars and five years on the now defunct virtual border fence project known as SBInet, DHS is still actively seeking to build a high tech virtual border along the southern border; this time, DHS is determined to purchase technology that meets performance standards and is delivered on time and at cost; DHS hopes to invest an additional $750 million to purchase mature sensor and surveillance technology; to ensure the project’s success, DHS is exploring off the shelf projects that can “plug and play” with hardware and software from other suppliers; contracts will be terminated if they are delivered late, fail to meet performance standards, or are over initial costs projections

Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) says the United States arrested people from nations designated as terrorism sponsors on the border with Mexico in the first nineteen months of Obama administration; an Austin newspaper investigated this claim and reached these conclusions: Cornyn is right that there were arrests of people from the four states designated by the United States as sponsoring terrorism (Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria) — but: the number of people from these states arrested on the Mexican border is miniscule (0.02 percent of the 540,865 total arrests on the southwestern border in fiscal 2009); 87 percent of the people from these countries arrested while trying to enter the United States illegally do so through the Canadian border; and the numbers are dropping: there were 3,309 apprehensions of people from terrorism-sponsoring countries in 2005 (when Libya and North Korea were also on the list), 935 apprehensions in 2009, and 736 in fiscal 2010