After thousands of fearful Hispanic students failed to show up for classes on Monday in Alabama, the state’s top education official announced that children would still be allowed to attend even if they did not have birth certificates

Local law enforcement officials and state lawmakers are increasingly working to circumvent Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick’s decision to opt out of the controversial Secure Communities immigration program; last Wednesday U.S Senator Scott Brown (R-Massachusetts) called on DHS secretary Janet Napolitano to allow the state to join Secure Communities without Governor Patrick’s approval; Under Secure Communities, a detained individual’s fingerprints are automatically scanned and checked against DHS and FBI databases to determine their immigration status

A recently released report concludes that violence from the Mexican government’s war against the drug cartels is increasingly spreading into the United States; the report found that as the Mexican military cracks down further on drug cartels, these organizations have pushed further north into Texas to create a “sanitary zone”

On Monday InfoZen announced that it had won a $90 million five-year contract with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to provide IT services

A new GAO report says that that fact that there is no comprehensive security strategy for the U.S.-Mexico border makes it difficult for the Pentagon effectively to use the National Guard units assigned to help the Border Patrol guard the border

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers working at the Paso Del Norte (PDN) international crossing in El Paso have initiated work on a system which uses fingerprints to expedite the pedestrian entry process; CBP says the new system will result in more efficient processing of arriving pedestrian traffic

After months of debate, the Pentagon has agreed to pay the expenses for keeping 1,200 National Guard troops stationed along the U.S.— Mexico border; the Pentagon will pay roughly $10 million each month for the Guard’s deployment through the end of this year

Last week California legislators approved a controversial bill that would allow undocumented workers to receive state loans for college

Homeland Security NewsWire’s executive editor Eugene Chow recently got the opportunity to catch up with Lee Maril, a professor at East Carolina University and the director of the university’s Center on Diversity and Inequality Research; Maril specializes in border security and immigration issues along the southern border and recently published The Fence: Human Smuggling, Terrorists, and Public Safety along the US Mexico Border; in his interview with HSNW, Maril discusses the government’s ongoing attempts to build a virtual border fence, improving the border patrol, and the motives behind the latest push for a fence along the border