• With border arrests down, some question Trump administration's push for more agents

    The Department of Homeland Security’s announced this week a near-record decline in the number of people caught trying to enter the country illegally. Yet the Trump administration still wants to hire thousands of more border agents.

  • Israel demolishes Gaza tunnel, killing 9 Palestinian militants

    The Israel military (IDF) on Monday morning destroyed a tunnel Hamas fighters were building under the Israel-Gaza Strip. The Hamas Health Ministry in Gaza said that nine Palestinians were killed and eight others were wounded when the IDF blew up the tunnel. Israel this summer began work on an underground barrier meant to counter attack tunnels.

  • Hundreds of U.S. citizens continue to be detained: Immigration data

    An analysis of U.S. government data shows that the U.S. government detained more than 260 U.S. citizens for weeks and even years, most in private prisons under contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They were released after asserting their U.S. citizenship claims in immigration court. The average time of detention for U.S. citizens was 180 days. ICE acknowledges that it is unlawful for ICE to detain U.S. citizens under deportation laws.

  • EFF to court: Border agents need warrants to search contents of digital devices

    Searches of mobile phones, laptops, and other digital devices by federal agents at international airports and U.S. land borders are highly intrusive forays into travelers’ private information that require a warrant, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in a court filing Monday.

  • Border wall would put more than 100 endangered species at risk: Experts

    President Donald Trump’s desire for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border has elicited endless questions since it was introduced as a major theme in his campaign. Who will pay for it? How will it be constructed? Is it the most effective strategy? What is the timeline? Biologists are asking another question: What are the ecological and evolutionary consequences of the wall?

  • Construction of first border wall segment to begin sooner than expected along Rio Grande

    U.S. Customs and Border Protection will begin constructing the first segment of President Trump’s border wall in November through a national wildlife refuge, using money it has already received from Congress. This is what a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official recently told a nonprofit group that raises money to support two national wildlife refuges in South Texas, according to the group’s vice president.

  • U.K. revokes citizenship of 150 jihadists to block influx of militants from Syria

    The United Kingdom has stripped more than 150 suspected jihadists and other criminals of their British citizenship in an effort to block them from returning. The government has issued what is called a “deprivation orders,” anticipating that the coming collapse of the Islamic State caliphate will leads to an influx of British Islamist militants from Syria.

  • Border funding bill passes U.S. House; Texans vote along party lines

    The U.S. House on Thursday passed about $800 billion in federal spending, including $1.6 billion worth of funding that will go toward constructing a border wall. While there is almost no chance this legislation will become law, Republican lawmakers can head back to their home districts pointing to the wall funding as a legislative step toward a tenet of the Trump presidential campaign.

  • Trump administration awards $2.3 million to Texas for border security

    The Texas Military Department has received a $2.3 million boost from the federal government to help with the state’s border-security efforts. The state’s military presence has been concentrated in the Rio Grande Valley since 2014 when a surge of undocumented migration from Central America created a crisis situation. Proponents of the move said it was needed to help an overwhelmed U.S. Border Patrol, whose agents were ill-prepared to handle the influx and concentrate on border security efforts.

  • Mexico’s Southern Border Program lacks “structure and a clear-cut road map”

    Mexico’s Programa Frontera Sur (Southern Border Program or PFS) is not meeting its goals of containing the mixed migration flows from Central America to Mexico and the United States, a new study found. “Despite the fact that PFS was conceived as an instrument of state policy intended to foster development and reinforce border security while mitigating migrants’ vulnerability, the program’s results so far raise deep concerns as to whether it has complied with its stated spirit,” says one researcher.

  • Immigration does not raise crime: Studies

    Immigration has no effect on crime, according to a comprehensive examination of fifty-one studies on the topic published between 1994 and 2014. The meta-analysis is the first on the relationship between immigration and crime. The reviewed studies most frequently found no relationship between immigration and crime. But among those that did find a correlation, it was 2.5 times more likely that immigration was linked to a reduction in crime than an increase.

  • Attorneys spar over Texas immigration law in federal court

    Monday was the first day of what could be a lengthy legal battle over Senate Bill 4, which has been billed as the toughest state-based immigration bill in the country. Opponents of Texas’ state-based immigration law told a federal judge that allowing the controversial measure to stand would pave the way for a nationwide police state where local officers could subvert the established immigration-enforcement powers of the federal government.

  • Lawyers convention leaves Texas over state's new immigration law

    A 15,000-member association of attorneys and law professors said on Wednesday that it is relocating its 2018 convention out of Texas in response to the state legislature passing Senate bill 4, a sweeping and controversial immigration enforcement measure. About 3,000 people were expected to attend the event.

  • New training to improve operational security at U.S. border

    Drug smugglers, human traffickers, illegal immigrants, and even potential terrorists crossing the United States border do their best to, literally, cover their tracks. It is the responsibility of the United States Border Patrol (USBP) to pursue and apprehend these individuals. Without proper training, tracking people who do not want to be found is a nearly impossible task, and it can be extremely difficult even with training. S&T’s First Responders Group (FRG) has developed training to assist in increasing tracking abilities.

  • Germany failing to use language and dialect recognition tech to ID asylum-seekers, extremists: Critics

    Critics in Germany say that the country’s immigration agency has failed to use a language recognition software which would have helped immigration agents identify the country of origin of asylum-seekers who have no other ID documents. German authorities could have also identified Islamist and far-right terror suspects earlier if available language recognition software was used, these critics say.