More than 20,000 people around the world had their dreams of immigrating to America dashed when the U.S. State Department reported that it had erroneously informed them that they had won a lottery that would allow them to live legally in the United States; the U.S. State Department apologized and cited a computer programming error that led to faulty results that had to be invalidated; the lottery is an annual free competition that randomly awards 50,000 people with a visa without the usual employee sponsor or family sponsor; this year nearly fifteen million people applied

The Optional Practical Training program allows foreign students graduating from American colleges to stay in the United States after graduating for twelve months to work in their field of study; the George W. Bush administration introduced a measure allowing some science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduates to stay for additional seventeen months — for a total of twenty-nine months of practical training; the Obama administration has now expanded the STEM list to include many additional degree programs, among them soil microbiology, video graphics and special effects, dairy science, neuroscience, mathematics and computer science, business statistics, personality psychology, medical informatics, and pharmaceutics and drug design

A new DHS approach to gauging border security will develop a numeric value to be assigned to each of the Border Patrol Sectors to measure just how secure it is; the new index will still include traditional measures such as crime data, apprehensions of suspects, and contraband seizures, but it will go beyond these measures to include hospitals reports on suspected illegal aliens they treat, traffic accidents involving illegal aliens or narcotics smugglers, rates of vehicle theft and numbers of abandoned vehicles, impacts on property values, and other measures of economic activity and environmental impacts

In the wild, mammals survive because they can see and evade predators lurking in the shadowy bushes; this ability translates to the human world — Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screeners can pick out dangerous objects in an image of our messy and stuffed suitcases

Each year Mexican drug cartels smuggle billions of dollars of cash into and out of the United States, yet despite their best efforts, DHS officials are struggling to stem the flow of cash that is fueling the drug wars; the Department of Justice estimates that each year Mexican drug cartels smuggle as much as $39 billion in cash across the southern border; DHS officials say that it is having a difficult time detecting cash; officials are actively seeking to develop technological solutions to help detect individuals smuggling large amounts of cash across the border; but the technology to accomplish this goals may not exist yet as there are several large technical and logistical hurdles that must be overcome

Texas lawmakers are pushing federal officials to deploy more unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) along the state’s southern border with Mexico; currently one Predator drone patrols the skies above Texas’ border and the Gulf Coast, while three Predators operate out of Arizona and one in North Dakota; Representative Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) and two other congressman from Texas recently met with state and federal officials to lobby for the additional deployment of drones

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