• Immigration

    Federal immigration officials are seeking to deport a veteran of the Army and Navy who has served with distinction in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay; authorities have held Elisha L. Dawkins in a federal lockup in Miami since May. His crime: lying on a passport application

  • Border security

    President Obama has ordered the National Guard currently deployed along the U.S.-Mexico border to remain there for at least an additional three months to assist with border security; the Pentagon has agreed to spend $35 million to extend the deployment of the 1,200 National Guardsmen sent last year to California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas through the end of September

  • Border security

    Using sex and money, Mexican drug cartels have been increasingly successful in corrupting U.S. border agents while the federal government has struggled to stop it; since 2004 CBP has made 127 arrests or indictments against border agents for acts of corruption which include “drug smuggling, alien smuggling, money laundering, and conspiracy”; jurisdictional turf wars between the FBI and the DHS Inspector General have limited the government’s ability to investigate and prosecute corruption cases effectively; corruption is still relatively limited given the size of the U.S. border force — more than 20,000 agents

  • Border security

    U.S. border patrol agents seized nearly 160 pounds of raw iguana meat along the San Diego border; a thirty-seven year old man attempted to smuggle the iguana meat across the border by stashing it in three coolers underneath fish

  • Railroad companies are protesting nearly $400 million in fines for illegal drugs smuggled aboard its trains; under U.S. law, all shipping companies are subject to fines of $500 per ounce of marijuana and $1,000 per ounce of heroin or cocaine if U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents find drugs hidden in their cargo; Union Pacific argues that they are being punished for the actions of drug smugglers which they cannot control

  • On Wednesday, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency announced that it would audit 1,000 U.S. employers in critical food, energy, and infrastructure industries; ICE did not specify which businesses would be targeted, but did say that immigration agents would focus on seventeen sectors including agriculture, financial services, nuclear reactors, water treatment, and health care

  • DHS, the Justice Department, and the Federal Trade Commission are joining forces to stop notary publics, or notarios, in the United States from scamming immigrants; last year, the Justice Department working in conjunction with ICE, the FBI and other agencies, prosecuted dozens notarios who falsely pretended to be lawyers and worked on the behalf of immigrants

  • Aviation security

    Research shows that when people search for objects — say, air port security personnel screening baggage for weapons — they typically miss the second of two objects once they find the first one; missing a second target is a well-known issue called “satisfaction of search,” and it manifests itself in both airport screening and looking for cancerous tumors in a lab; now researchers find that anxiety heightened the satisfaction-of-search problem

  • Aviation security

    The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) is rallying against two proposed amendments that would cut the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) budget and limit its employees’ collective bargaining rights; the union is urging the Senate to reject the two amendments in the 2012 DHS budget that the House passed; the amendment to cut $300 million from TSA’s budget comes as part of a broader turf war between two House Republican chairmen

  • Border security

    U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) purchased its new King Air 350, twin engine Multi-role Enforcement Aircraft (MEA), bolstering DHS’s capabilities of patrolling the skies along U.S. borders; designed to be a truly multi-role aircraft, the MEA is equipped with a sophisticated array of active and passive sensors, technical collection equipment, and satellite communications capabilities that can be deployed for ground interdiction operations, air-to-air intercept operations, and medium-range maritime patrols

  • Immigration

    Texas governor Rick Perry wants the legislature to pass a measure which would prohibit local police agencies from barring their officers from asking people they pull over, or otherwise detain, about their legal status in the United States; police chiefs from Houston and Dallas say the bill would impose additional costs on their already-strained budgets and would end up hampering public safety, because it would force them to divert resources and manpower to dealing with undocumented immigrants rather than criminals

  • Immigration

    Last Thursday Alabama Governor Robert Bentley signed a tough new immigration bill that includes a requirement that all employers in the state to use the E-Verify system; under the law, all employers will have to verify a prospective worker’s immigration status using the E-Verify system; the law also requires that businesses check the immigration status of day laborers and contains provisions regarding transportation and rental agreements

  • Immigration

    Massachusetts has become the latest state to reject DHS’s Secure Communities program; the state announced it would not sign a memorandum of understanding to participate in the DHS program; Massachusetts is the fourth state to reject Secure Communities in recent weeks; New York, California, and Illinois have all made efforts to reject the program as well; a DHS official said the federal government will force Massachusetts to join the program and that the state has no jurisdiction to opt out

  • Annals of (almost) outrage

    Delta Airlines charged U.S. military personnel for check in additional bags on a returning from a tour in Afghanistan, sparking outrage and leading three airlines to change their baggage fee policies for service members; Delta forced thirty-six reservists from Oklahoma to spend a total of more than $2,800 to check in their fourth bags; video of the incident quickly went viral and veterans sharply criticized Delta for charging the service members; Pentagon official played down the incident, saying soldiers’ travel orders stipulate that the government would reimburse soldiers for all excess bag fees

  • Border security

    In 2002 the United States provide sixteen countries with a border-monitoring system called Personal Identification, Secure Comparison and Evaluation System (PISCES); Pakistan has now decided to replace the system with a Pakistani-developed system called Integrated Border Management System (IBMS); the government says the reason for the change is the IBMS is more capable, and denies the decision is the result of worries that the United States has access to PISCES-collected information

  • Mexico

    In the latest development in Mexico’s bloody drug trade, it seems that rival cartels are building large armored vehicles in their fight against one another; over the weekend, the Mexican Army found two “Mad Max” style “narco tanks” in Ciudad Camargo in the state of Tamaulipas near the Texas border; the two vehicles had inch-thick steel armor and were built on a three-axle truck bed with a heavily armored cabin; the vehicles were capable of withstanding fire from 50 caliber mounted weapons and grenade blasts; so far none of the tanks have been used to confront the Mexican Army and officials believe that they are primarily used in inter-gang warfare

  • Readers' comments

    SBInet was a dismal failure — at a cost of more than $1 billion to the American taxpayer; the public deserves much better than DHS has given us along the Mexican border, including a fair and objective investigation of Boeing’s waste of taxpayer’s money in hard economic times

  • Border security

    A heated political battle in Arizona has begun that could result in the author of the state’s controversial immigration law Senate President Russell Pearce’s recall; the leaders of the recall effort, Citizens For A Better Arizona (CFBA), say they have collected more signatures for the petition to recall Pearce than the number of votes he received in the last election; on Tuesday, the group submitted 18,315 signatures in support of the recall, more than double the state’s requirement of 7,756 signatures; before the recall can move forward, the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office must validate each of the signatures

  • Immigration

    A recent inspection by DHS officials found that 89 percent of workers at a dairy farm in Morgan County, Colorado were not authorized to work in the United States legally; twenty of the fifty-three employees found working illegally at Wildcat Dairy were arrested for using forged Social Security Cards and green cards; the workers will first be charged for possessing false identities, and once that case is settled their immigration status will be addressed; the owner of the dairy will not face any state charges, but could be charged by federal immigration authorities for failing to verify employees with the e-verify system

  • In defiance of federal immigration officials, San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey announced that as of 1 June he would no longer hand over illegal immigrants arrested for low-level crimes to immigration authorities; Hennessey’s actions come in support of San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy which prohibits local officials from cooperating with federal authorities unless immigrants are suspected felons; illegal immigrants arrested for minor crimes like public intoxication or shoplifting will not be held in jail; the new policy does not bar individual sheriff’s deputies from cooperating with federal immigration officials