President Barack Obama announced the Deferred Action for Parental Accountability(DAPA) initiative on 20 November, and a day later, USCIS began to publish job postings seeking individuals to help with the rollout. Applicants who qualify for DAPA still have until May 2015 before they may apply, but immigration officials are taking a proactive approach and anticipating a large number of applications in order to avoid the mistakes made during the Obama administration’s launch of HealthCare.gov.

An internal memo from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) notes that the federal government is seeking to fill 1,000 full-time permanent and temporary positions at a new “operational center” in Crystal City, Arlington, Virginia, in response to the Obama administration’s executive actions to allow some five million undocumented immigrants have their deportation deferred, apply for driver’s licenses in most states, and apply for two-year work permits.

Janine Corrado and Jeffrey M. Matta are leaving CBP IA to assume other positions outside of CBP IA.Corradowill receive a promotion to the position of Chief of Staff for Gregory Marshall, Chief Security Officer at DHS. Matta will take a position in the Office of Field Operations at CBP. J. Gregory Richardson, who worked at CBP IA, complained that Corrado and Matta ignored his status as a disabled veteran despite extensive documentation of his medical condition.

Leaders of the U.S. tech industry hoped President Barack Obama’s recent immigration speech would unveil specifics on how his executive action on immigration would affect the number of highly skilled foreigners who would be granted American work visas. Instead, Obama just mentioned that he would “make it easier and faster for high-skilled immigrants, graduates and entrepreneurs to stay and contribute to our economy, as so many business leaders have proposed.”Since Obama did not announce specific plans for the H-1B visa program, tech industry leaders will now push for more congressional support – even though the House did not bring to a vote a bi-partisan Senate bill which would have increased visas for skilled workers to at least 115,000.

While the details and implications of President Barack Obama’s immigration reforms continue to be closely scrutinized, an unprecedented scandal unfolds within the federal agency charged with providing security and control at our Mexican border. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), a law enforcement agency of 65,000 employees, is potentially facing alarming charges fostered by its former assistant director of Customs and Border Protection Internal Affairs (CBP IA), James F. Tomscheck. Tomscheck, who turned federal whistleblower last summer, lambasted his superiors with multiple accusations. Allegations, however, have arisen against Tomscheck that he knowingly discriminated against a disabled military veteran within CBP IA, then fired him.

A new complaint to the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties charge sthat U.S. Customs and Border Protection(CBP) agents routinely ignore asylum seekers’ claim of fear of prosecution in their homeland, a claim which could grant them asylum in the United States. The complaint further states that CBP officers are increasingly using “expedited removal” to deport illegal immigrants. Unlike conventional deportation, expedited removal occurs outside of the judicial process. The number of expedited removal orders more than doubled in less than a decade from 72,911 in 2005 to 193,092 in 2013.

In the face of bitter protests from Republicans in Congress, President Obama will soon announce that he will be using executive orders to launch a broad overhaul of the U.S. immigration enforcement system. One of the immediate results of the overhaul would be to shield up to five million undocumented immigrants – nearly half of the estimated 11.5 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States — from the threat of deportation. The president’s orders will also provide many of these undocumented immigrants with work permits.

Customs and Border Protection(CBP) agent Thomas G. Wrocklage has triumphedin his effort to return to work following a federal appeals court’s disagreement with how the Merit Systems Protection Board(MSPB) decided his removal appeal. Wrocklage disagreed with his supervisors about a $300 fine issued to an elderly couple returning from a trip to Canada for failure to disclose to a second border officer that they had with them some fruits and vegetables.

Is there an “immigration crisis” on the U.S.-Mexico border? Not according to an examination of historical immigration data, according to a new study. The paper examines historical immigration data, the “push” and “pull” factors currently motivating Mexicans and Central Americans to migrate to the United States and attempts to explain why current undocumented immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border has been perceived as a crisis.