• ICE to audit 1,000 critical infrastructure companies

    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

  • Federal agencies crack down on immigration scams

    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

  • Anxious Searchers Miss Multiple Targets

    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

  • Unions rally against proposed TSA cuts

    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

  • CBP buys upgraded aircraft for border patrol

    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

  • Police chiefs oppose proposed Texas immigration measure

    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

  • Alabama joins E-Verify program

    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

  • Massachusetts defies feds, rejects Secure Communities

    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

  • Airlines change bag policy after soldiers' video goes viral

    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

  • Pakistan phases out U.S.-made border monitoring software

    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

  • Mexican drug cartels build "narco tanks"

    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

  • SBInet: dismal failure // from Lee Maril, Ph.D.

    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

  • Author of controversial Arizona immigration bill could face recall

    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

  • Twenty workers arrested on Colorado farm for forged IDs

    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