• Panel's draft bill shields DHS funds

    A house panel introduced a bill last week that will protect DHS from budget cuts facing other domestic agencies under the house’s budget plan. This will allow the department to hire 1,600 new agents at Customs and Border Patrol agency, replace cuts to local and state governments, boost spending on cybersecurity, and abandon cuts to the Coast Guard.

  • Obama, Democrats walking a tight rope on gay couples and immigration reform

    Gay rights organizations are putting pressure on President Obama to offer more support to changing the bipartisan immigration bill so that the foreign partners of gay Americans would have the same rights as the foreign partners of straight Americans. Obama and many Democratic lawmakers are caught between the wishes of an important constituency in the Democratic Party, and a desire to see the immigration overhaul measure passed. Having gay couples enjoy the same rights as straight couples may threaten the bill’s chances of passing.

  • CBP reports 2012 increase in arrests on the border

    Customs and Border Protection (CBP) chief Michael Fisher told a Senate committee last week that arrests of illegal border crossers have gone up 13 percent this year. The increase in arrests last year breaks a 7-year trend of decreasing arrests along the border.

  • Lawmakers defeat Sen. Cruz’s amendment because of its cost

    Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), saying the Gang of Eight’s immigration overhaul draft does not provide DHS with sufficient incentives to bolster border security, offers an amendment which would substantially increase border security funding. Fellow GOP lawmakers say the price tag — $30-$40 billion – is too high, and defeat the amendment.

  • Sen. Rubio slams Heritage Foundation report on cost of immigration reform

    Senator Marco Rubio(R-Florida) wasted little time attacking a report by the Heritage Foundation which estimated that new immigration overhaul legislation, of which Rubio is one of the authors, would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion over fifty years. “The Heritage Foundation is] the only group that’s looked at [immigration reform] and reached the conclusion they’ve reached. Everybody else who has analyzed immigration reform understands that if you do it, and we do it right, it will be a net positive for our economy. Their argument is based on a single premise, which I think is flawed,” Rubio added. “That is these people are disproportionately poor because they have no education and they will be poor for the rest of their lives in the U.S. Quite frankly, that’s not the immigration experience in the U.S. That’s certainly not my family’s experience in the U.S.”

  • Co-author of Heritage report: Hispanic immigrants have lower IQ than white Americans

    In a 2009 public policy doctoral dissertation, the co-author of the Heritage Foundation immigration report wrote that Hispanic immigrants are less intelligent than white Americans. “Immigrants living in the U.S. today do not have the same level of cognitive ability as natives,” Jason Richwine, a senior policy analyst at Heritage, wrote. “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach I.Q. parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-I.Q. children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”

  • Senators debate border security measurement methodology

    The immigration reform bill contains $4 billion for border security. The problem is that no one is quite sure how to measure border security, how do we decide that the border is secure, and who would make that decision.

  • DHS now willing to discuss deportation policy with agents' union

    In an effort to head off a possible set back in  court, the Obama administration said earlier this week that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents’ lawsuit to overturn the president’s selective deportation policy should be thrown out court because the agents originally wanted to handle the issues through collective bargaining.

  • GOP opponents of the immigration bill gearing up for a campaign to kill it

    Republicans opposed to the bi-partisan Senate immigration bill are getting set to launch a campaign to defeat the bill, as the Senate Judiciary Committee begins a review on the bill Thursday. The committee is expected to spend at least three weeks on the bill, with GOP lawmakers opposing the bill ready to offer hundreds of amendments — some in an effort to make the bill more acceptable to them, others in an effort to kill it.

  • Sponsors: Immigration bill addresses visa flaws highlighted by the Boston bombing

    Lawmakers behind the bipartisan Senate immigration say bill directly addresses some of the security flaws that may have been exploited by the foreign student who helped Dzhokhar Tsarnaev dispose of evidence after the Boston Marathon bombings.

  • U.S. may acquire additional land for constructing border fence

    A U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) draft plan regarding the final sections of the border fence that separates the United States from Mexico could impact about 100 people, most reside in a nursing home, according to federal documents.

  • DHS instructs border agents to verify all international student visas

    DHS has sent a direct order to its Border Agents telling them that, “effective immediately,” they must verify that every international student who arrives in the United States has a valid student visa The student visa of Azamat Tazhayakov, one of the two Kazakh students charged with trying to destroy evidence related to the Boston Marathon bombing, was terminated before he arrived in New York on 20 January, but the border agent in the airport did not have access to DHS Department’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System.

  • Obama says same-sex amendment to immigration bill not likely to pass

    President Barack Obama announced at a news conference in Costa Rica on Friday that he backs a proposal which would allow Americans to seek legal immigration for their same-sex partners. Obama said that it was “the right thing to do,” but he acknowledged that the provision has little chance of making it into the final immigration package.

  • Obama warning liberals to be flexible on immigration bill

    Many in Washington have been worried about Republican objections to the immigration overhaul bill, but President Obama and leading Democrats have begun a quiet campaign to assuage the concerns of liberal groups which argue that the bill excludes too many immigrants and makes the path to citizenship too arduous.

  • Rubio says immigration reform bill will likely not pass the House

    Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) said on a talk radio show on Tuesday that the bipartisan immigration reform legislation unveiled last week, will likely not pass the Republican-led House. “[The bill] will have to be adjusted, because people are very suspicious about the willingness of the government to enforce the laws now,” Rubio said.