Barack Obama picks political fight with immigration agents, accusing them of terrorizing illegal immigrants and calling for a “top-to-bottom” review of the policies of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
ICE’s Scheduled Departure program — or any voluntary immigration deportation program — will fail until Congress reforms immigration law to provide some incentive for illegal immigrants to voluntarily participate. As it stands, Congress has created incentives for just the opposite.
Lawmakers’ use of “Gestapo” tag is wildly out of line, former immigration official Chris Battle (and Security Debrief contributor) writes in US News & World Report.
In light of the recent controversies provoked by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement more aggressively pursuing its mission with regard to worksite enforcement, this article in the current issue of Business Week is worth reading.
When agents at ICE aren’t being criticized for not being aggressive enough, they’re being attacked for being too aggressive. A columnist on the West Coast attacks ICE as a “do nothing” agency even as politicians on the East Coast are accusing agents of being terrorists and Nazis. What’s wrong with this picture?
The latest criticism of Congressman Luis Gutierrez for his outrageous comparison of ICE agents to Nazis comes from the Anti-Defamation League. In an August 14 letter to Gutierrez, the ADL calls upon the congressman to repudiate his “inappropriate and insensitive” remarks.
A week after dressing down TSA for suggesting that Congress did not really mean for all air cargo to be scanned, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson followed up with a letter to DHS accusing it of trying to undermine congressional intent to fully scan 100 percent of all cargo — both air and maritime.
Both the fourth circuit and the ninth circuit courts have ruled that Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) searches of laptops and other electronics are legal; however, people are still proclaiming their protests. A recent USA Today op-ed accused the CBP practice to be “without focus” and “arbitrar[y].” Constitutional objections have also been invoked, claiming the searches to be in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
A terrorist operative hoping to use the flow of international commerce against us found his job all the more difficult because of the security programs which Admiral Peterman oversaw and directed.
The most glaring problem with the “100 percent” model is that it goes against the globally accepted consensus that a risk-analysis and layered approach is a far more comprehensive and effective security model than the concept of “100 percent scanning.”
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