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Mexico deploys Israeli UAVs in war on drug cartels
Since December 2006, nearly 30,000 Mexicans have been killed in that country’s increasingly vicious drug war; the relentless flow of guns from the United States into Mexico has significantly strengthened the drug cartels, allowing them not only to withstand the efforts by the Mexican authorities to impose law and order, but in many cases to take the operational initiative, making large swaths of the country ungovernable; the Mexican government, for its part, is bolstering its own capabilities: last year it has secretly purchased surveillance UAVs from Israel to perform monitoring tasks in border areas and near strategic installations in the country
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Biggest mass graves linked to drug-related violence uncovered in Mexico
Seventy-two bodies found in a mass grave on a ranch in northern Mexico; in recent months an increasing number of mass graves have been discovered; in June, police recovered fifty-five bodies from an abandoned mine near Taxco, in Guerrerro state
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Under Obama: company audits up, illegal worker arrests way down
Under Obama, employer audits are up 50 percent, fines have tripled to almost $3 million, and the number of executives arrested is slightly up over the Bush administration; the numbers of arrests and deportations of illegals taken into custody at work sites, however, plummeted by more than 80 percent from the last year of the Bush; both administrations agree that jobs are the magnet that attracts illegal immigrants to the United States, but critics of the Obama approach say it makes no sense to allow employees known to use fake or stolen identification to go free to duplicate the fraud again
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Border Patrol to buy two new UAV for U.S.-Mexico border
Just-passed border bill includes $32 million to buy two new Predator B turboprop UAV aircraft from General Atomics, as well as fund operating control stations for them; retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Michael Kostelnik, the assistant Customs and Border Protection commissioner for the Office of Air and Marine, told a House subcommittee that twenty-four UAVs would eventually be needed to cover the entire northern and southern borders and U.S. coastlines
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Tunnels under U.S.-Mexico border growing national security threat
There is growing problem along the U.S.-Mexico border: tunnels which connect the bad guys on both sides of the border; in the past several years, the number of border tunnels has increased 63 percent, and U.S. and Mexican authorities use robots and radar to detect them
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Footpaths across the Rio Grande allow easy route into U.S.
There are footpaths across the Rio Grande which could easily facilitate movement of illegal immigrants and smugglers across the river without getting wet — but they are not called bridges, but rather “grade control structure”; they were built in the 1930s to stabilize and prevent a shift during high river flow; the local sheriff says that “a terrorist could pass here with weapons of mass destruction and be in the United States and up on the interstate and gone in a short time”
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Drug cartels employ women assassins (sicarias) in broad killing campaign
As the drug war in Mexico escalates, drug cartels have began to employ sicaria, or hit women; the women assassins, ranging in age from 18 to 30, work alongside men in cells of La Linea, as the Juárez drug cartel is known; cells are assigned to different jobs — such as halcones (lookouts), hit squads, and extortionists — and operate independently; the hit women are trained to use rifles and handguns and sometimes accompany their male counterparts; women in Juárez have been previously accused of being part of kidnapping rings, often assigned to keep watch on captives; women have also held roles as recruiters, transporters and leaders of drug-smuggling cells
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In Georgia, immigration officials targeting criminals, employers
A DHS report says 480,000 “unauthorized immigrants” were living in Georgia as of January 2009, ranking Georgia sixth among states behind California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois, respectively, and just ahead of Arizona; leaders of the $65-billion-a-year food and fiber production and processing industry in Georgia are worried about economic impact of get-tough immigration approach
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Arizona waits for court decision before changing immigration law
In response to the 28 July decision by U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton to block the more important provisions of the controversial Arizona immigration law, Governor Jan Brewer suggested that Arizona may “tweak” the law in order to address Bolton’s objections; Arizona legislatures say there is no point in rewriting the law while the state is appealing the judge’s decision; in any event, since Bolton blocked the provisions on grounds that they are preempted by federal authority over immigration matters, then the preemption issue will have to be settled by the courts before the legislature revisits the law
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Drug war fought with American weapons for the American market
Mexico’s drug war is fought with American weapons for the American market; of the 75,000 guns seized, 80 percent came from the United States; they are used to fight over an estimated $40 billion drug business — virtually all for the United States; last Year, at least 2,600 were killed in Mexico’s drug war, and the country is on track to top 3,000 this year
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New baggage screening system from Morpho Detection evaluated
Unlike most baggage-screening systems that create two-dimensional images of objects inside luggage, the CTX 9800 DSi scanners from Morpho Detection create three-dimensional images that can be digitally manipulated by personnel when a bag is deemed to be suspicious; the machines also use advanced software to detect suspicious items; Mineta San Jose International Airport once used 28 machines to process 1,800 bags an hour, but the new system will be able to process the same number of bags using eight machines and require fewer employees to supervise the process; the technology reduces reliance on human observation and interaction with the bags; for the majority of bags, employee contact is only required when a piece of luggage is placed on or taken off the conveyor belt
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DHS seeking unattended sensors technology for border surveillance
DHS is seeking information from companies who can build unattended ground sensors that can detect and locate people, boats, or vehicles moving along rivers, roads, and paths in dense forests; DHS says it needs this capability for border surveillance to monitor those entering the United States illegally in rough terrain
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All U.S. counties on Mexican border now share inmate fingerprints with feds
All 25 U.S. counties along the Mexican border are now enrolled in the Secure Communities project; federal immigration officials now have access to the prints of every inmate booked into jail in these counties; Secure Communities makes the notification automatic; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which plans to implement the program nationwide by 2013, says the program has identified more than 262,900 illegal immigrants in jails and prisons who have been charged with or convicted of criminal offenses, including more than 39,000 charged with or convicted of violent offenses or major drug crimes; ICE expects to remove 400,000 illegal immigrants this year; of the 200,000 illegal immigrants deported in the first ten months of fiscal year 2010, 142,000 illegal immigrants were with criminal records and about 50,000 were noncriminals; immigrant advocates say that some counties use Secure Communities to deport noncriminals: the national average of noncriminals flagged by Secure Communities is about 28 percent, but in Travis County, Texas, 82 percent of those removed through Secure Communities were noncriminals
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NY Naval Militia in WMD detection homeland security exercise on Hudson River
Several New York States government agencies take part in an exercise on the Hudson River aimed to examine radiation detection capabilities; the exercise was part of Trojan Horse 2010 an annual maritime security training exercise sponsored by State University of New York Maritime College
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Fingerprint sharing through Secure Communities led to deportation of 47,000
As of 3 August, 3, 494 U.S. counties and local and state agencies in 27 states were using the Secure Communities program to share fingerprints from jail bookings; from October 2008 through June 2010, 46,929 people identified through Secure Communities were removed from the U.S.; of those, 12,293 were considered non-criminals; one immigration advocate says: “ICE has pulled a bait and switch, with local law enforcement spending more time and resources facilitating the deportations of bus boys and gardeners than murderers and rapists and at considerable cost to local community policing strategies, making us all less safe”
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More headlines
The long view
The Manufactured Crisis of Migrant Terrorists at the Border
Politicians and pundits have given rise to a flood of rhetoric about terrorists exploiting border chaos to harm Americans. But exaggerated threats of terrorists crossing the southern border lead to costly, disproportionate policy decisions.