Tag: Dept of Homeland Security

Let’s see what Lou Dobbs makes of this one: turns out the crackdown on border crossings by undocumented immigrants has actually led to an increase in the violent smuggling, kidnapping and ransoms demanded for delivering undocumented workers into the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice are expecting the expansion of the new “Secure Communities” initiative to create an avalanche of new deportation cases in an effort “to remove all criminal aliens held in the United States prisons and jails.” The Justice Department justifies the move in the proposed budget to boost funding for immigration courts:

At the Senate Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearing this morning, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano carefully skirted repeated questions about her views of whether longtime undocumented immigrants living in the United States ought to get a chance at legalization.

Last July, presidential candidate Barack Obama took a stage in Berlin and told the adoring crowd that a wall erected between people — like that which divided the German capital for decades — would best be knocked down.

FEMA coughed up more than $1.6 million in federal disaster relief funds Thursday to compensate the Colorado State Forest Service for fighting the 13,000-acre Malo Vega Fire in Costilla County in June 2007.

President Obama announced today that he plans to nominate John Morton to be assistant secretary of homeland security for immigration and customs enforcement (ICE). Morton is a longtime Justice Department official and current acting deputy assistant attorney general of the criminal division. Esther Olavarria, a Senior Fellow and Director of Immigration Policy at the Center for American Progress, is Obama's pick for deputy assistant secretary of homeland security for policy. Olavarria, in particular, signals a major change for DHS.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cares about your privacy. Really. And to prove it, the secretive agency established for "preserving our freedoms" recently released a report assessing the job of fusion centers — the intelligence-sharing operation that mashes national security data with suspicious-activity law enforcement reports for state, local and federal authorities. In an interesting moment of synchronicity with civil liberties advocates, DHS admits, yeah, there may be a few problems.

Civil libertarians and plain old libertarians are sounding the alarm over Pentagon plans to station 20,000 uniformed troops stateside to respond to domestic "catastrophes,"including nuclear, chemical or biological attacks, the Washington Post reports. The deployment, reported by The Colorado Independent's Erin Rosa a month ago, includes a 4,700-troop combat brigade based at Fort Stewart, Ga., under the command of the U.S. Northern Command's Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr., in Colorado Springs.

PHOENIX—If Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano becomes the new secretary of homeland security, this centrist Democrat could have the opportunity to institute nationwide reforms to address continuing problems with illegal immigration and border security. These reforms could grow out of the policies and programs that Napolitano has tested in her 15 years of public service in a state that is ground zero in America’s struggle to control its borders. UPDATE: As expected, Pres.-elect Barack Obama announced his national security team this morning, including Janet Napolitano at DHS and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

In the next three years the military plans to activate and train an estimated 4,700 service members for specialized domestic operations, according to Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, commander of U.S. Northern Command, which was created in 2002 for homeland defense missions.