Drone On

Atrios uses the term "security theater" to refer to government projects allegedly designed to protect us. His most recent post will give you some idea of the term. What these projects do is kind of murky. They are very expensive and very complex and very impressive and, did I mention?, very expensive. The expense is justified because we live in a very dangerous world. The loss of civil liberties which ensues from these projects is justified on the same basis. The problem is that these projects rarely actually result in increased security.

As evidence of my thesis, I offer the use of drones (thankfully, up to this point, as far as we know, unarmed) for patrolling our border with Mexico to keep those dirty brown people from entering our pristine republic and to keep out the nasty drugs that country insists on foisting upon us.

Now, as I noted recently, because of several factors, primarily the US economy, the flow of undocumented workers from Mexico and Latin America has dropped dramatically. That means that the primary justification for the use of the drones at the border has to do with the drug trade. And those expensive little buggers are just not as effective as they have been touted to be.

The mixed results highlight a glaring problem for Homeland Security officials who have spent six years and more than $250 million building the nation's largest fleet of domestic surveillance drones: The nine Predators that help police America's borders have yet to prove very useful in stopping contraband or illegal immigrants.

The border drones require an hour of maintenance for every hour they fly, cost more to operate than anticipated, and are frequently grounded by rain or other bad weather, according to a draft audit of the program last month by the Homeland Security Department's inspector general.

Last year, the unmanned fleet flew barely half the number of flight hours that Customs and Border Protection had scheduled on the northern or southern borders, or over the Caribbean, according to the audit.

And the drones often are unavailable to assist border agents because Homeland Security officials have lent the aircraft to the FBI, Texas Rangers and other government agencies for law enforcement, disaster relief and other uses. [Emphasis added]

Each drone costs $3,000 an hour to fly, which must pull a huge chunk from the DHS budget for border security, so some adjustments had to be made.

To help pay for the drones, Customs and Border Protection has raided budgets of its manned aircraft. One result: Flight hours were cut by 10% for the P-3 Orion maritime surveillance planes that hunt smuggling ships on the West Coast and in the Caribbean.

The amount of illicit drugs seized in Predator raids is "not impressive," acknowledged Michael Kostelnik, a retired Air Force major general who heads the office that supervises the drones.

Last year, the nine border drones helped find 7,600 pounds of marijuana, valued at $19.3 million. The 14 manned P-3 Orions helped intercept 148,000 pounds of cocaine valued at $2.8 billion. [Emphasis added]

Presumably the same problems noted for the drones used in patrolling the border also will crop up in the drones all of the local law enforcement agencies are clamoring for, but that doesn't seem to matter. The "eye in the sky" is just what the dictator ordered, so by god, we're gonna have them.

Once again I'm going back to bed to pull the covers over my head. Don't call me until the revolution has been underway for at least ten minutes.

Family Values

Earlier in the year, the Obama administration announced that some new rules on immigration would be formulated. On Monday, one new rule was posted for public comment, and the right wing anti-immigrant people went wild. Media Matters details just how crazy things got.

Right-wing media have attacked a proposed Obama administration rule change that would reduce the amount of time required for undocumented immigrants who are immediate relatives of American citizens to apply for residency as "stealth amnesty" by a "lawless regime." But the proposed rule change would allow eligible immigrants to obtain a lawful return visa without a long separation from their families...

The post details the hateful spewings of the usual suspects: Judicial Watch, the Drudge Report, Fox Nation. Go visit the post at Media Matters to view the nonsense crap being "reported" and links to those sources. I decline to post too much of either. I'd rather post a link to the Federal Register which sets forth the actual rule change and rationale behind it.

DHS proposes to change its current process for the filing and adjudication of certain waivers of inadmissibility for qualifying immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, who are physically present in the United States, but must proceed abroad to obtain their immigrant visas. DHS proposes to allow qualifying immediate relatives to apply for a provisional waiver of their inadmissibility for unlawful presence while they are still in the United States and before they leave to attend their immigrant visa interview abroad.

Approving an application for a provisional unlawful presence waiver prior to the immediate relative's immigrant visa interview will allow the DOS consular officer to issue the immigrant visa without delay if there are no other grounds of inadmissibility and if the immediate relative otherwise is eligible to be issued an immigrant visa. The immediate relative would not have to wait abroad during the period when USCIS adjudicates his or her waiver request, but rather could remain in the United States with his or her U.S. citizen spouse or parent during that period. As a result, U.S. citizens' separation from their immediate relatives would be significantly reduced. In addition, given the greater certainty that will result from this process, U.S. citizens and their family members would also be able to better plan for the immediate relative's departure and eventual return to the United States. [Emphasis added]

In other words, parents and/or spouses who are not here legally are being given a chance to expedite a determination on their status, in some cases, without leaving the country. They still have to go through the process, but will not have to be separated from their families for extended periods of time. This hardly looks like amnesty. What it does do is open a channel for those who have not entered the process because of the length of time and the expense involved an opportunity to make things right.

If the only "crime" involved is over-staying a visa, what's the harm? If the undocumented immigrant is the primary bread-winner for the family, or the only parent of an American born child, a lengthy separation doesn't do anything but punish harshly those left behind. The rule change would keep families intact.

The "family values" folks don't quite see it that way. Apparently only all-American families are valuable in their eyes. That certainly comes as no surprise, especially since it involves people with darker skins or differently shaped eyes.

The rule change has been posted by DHS for the mandatory period for public comment. You might want to wander over to the Federal Register for more information on how to enter your comment in the discussion. You can bet the usual suspects have been sending their minions over.

Dangerous 8-year-olds

Form over substance: the American Way. That appears to be the way Transportation Security Agency operates. If an individual shares the same name as one who is suspected of being a terrorist bent on single-handedly destroying this nation, he or she is not able to board an airplane without at least a pat-down, even if the traveler is an eight-year-old. An article in the NY Times details the hassle one such child (along with the rest of his family) has to face each time he flies.

It is true that Mikey is not on the federal government’s “no-fly” list, which includes about 2,500 people, less than 10 percent of them from the United States. But his name appears to be among some 13,500 on the larger “selectee” list, which sets off a high level of security screening. ...

For every person on the lists, hundreds of others may get caught up simply because they share the same name; a quick scan through a national phone directory unearthed 1,600 Michael Hickses. Over the past three years, 81,793 frustrated travelers have formally asked that they be struck from the watch list through the Department of Homeland Security; more than 25,000 of their cases are still pending. ... [Emphasis added]

As the article pointed out, the late Ted Kennedy was faced with the same problem. His case got cleared up swiftly, but he was a powerful and well-known senator. For those who aren't so fortunate, the delays and humiliation continue each and every time they try to fly. Michael Hicks, age 8, knows this only too well. There is, of course, a simple solution, one that the TSA has finally discovered after more than eight years:

Mr. Fotenos, the T.S.A. spokesman, promised improvements in a few months, as the agency’s Secure Flight Program takes full effect. Under the new system, airlines will collect every passenger’s birth date and gender, along with their names. The T.S.A. will cross-check all that with the watch lists. Previously, the airlines cross-checked the lists themselves, using only the names. [Emphasis added]

Well, bravo!

Morons.

Spooky Stuff

As the year winds down to a close, one thing the 111th Congress has not rushed to do (yet) is to extend certain provisions of the Patriot Act set to expire at the end of the year. What I suspect will happen is that in the next day or two, short-term extensions will pass which will enable Congress to revisit that detestable legislation in 2010. Hopefully the entire act will be reviewed and not just those set to expire.

An article in the NY Times gives some concrete reasons for why such a full-scale review is necessary.

In February, a Department of Homeland Security intelligence official wrote a “threat assessment” for the police in Wisconsin about a demonstration involving local pro- and anti-abortion rights groups.

That report soon drew internal criticism because the groups “posed no threat to homeland security,” according to a department memorandum released on Wednesday in connection with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The agency destroyed all its copies of the report and gave the author remedial training.

In March 2008, the office produced a “terrorism watch list” report about a Muslim conference in Georgia at which several Americans were scheduled to speak, even though it “did not have any evidence the conference or the speakers promoted radical extremism or terrorist activity,” and such speech is constitutionally protected, an internal report said.

And in October 2007, the office sent a report, “Nation of Islam: Uncertain Leadership Succession Poses Risks,” to hundreds of federal officials. Department guidelines had called for the files to be destroyed because the assessment of the group had lasted more than 180 days without uncovering evidence of potential terrorism.

As the article points out, all three reports and the files which generated those reports were ordered destroyed by DHS. While that is some comfort, it is cold comfort at best. First of all, I am not convinced that all traces of those investigations have disappeared. Somewhere there are files containing the names of subjects just waiting to be pulled up. And at least one of those reports was ordered destroyed after it had been sent to "hundreds of government officials."

Second, and perhaps even more important, the Patriot Act, in both its iterations, fostered an atmosphere in which such unlawful intelligence gathering was bound to happen, especially when the penalty for such snooping on citizens was nothing more than "remedial training." That means that such behavior will continue, especially since the current White House has done nothing concrete to ensure the behavior stops.

And that means that Congress should do the job by just repealing the Patriot Act. Of course, such a bold move is unlikely, given the current make-up of our national legislature, unless a few feet are held to the fire. One way to do that is to publish more articles like this one. Let's see if our press is ready to return to work.

A Top Cop Gets It

William Bratton, Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, has had a successful tenure. His community policing theories have been put into practice, dramatically lessening the tensions between his officers and the public they have sworn to serve and to protect. His insistence on meticulous record keeping on a day-to-day basis has allowed the department to immediately spot crime sprees so that additional police can be assigned to the infested area. More often than not, the presence of the men and women of his department now inspires relief, rather than dread in neighborhoods of the city troubled by gangsters and drug dealers. That's a remarkable achievement for a police force that has too often been the subject of Justice Department investigations.

Chief Bratton is about to move on, and, quite frankly, I'm sorry he's leaving.

Before taking his leave, he took the time to pen an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times in which he gives his perspective on the use of local police departments as an extension of Immigration and Customs Enforcement by the Department of Homeland Security. Here's the heart of his argument:

Keeping America's neighborhoods safe requires our police forces to have the trust and help of everyone in our communities. My nearly 40 years in law enforcement, and my experience as police commissioner in Boston and New York City and as chief in Los Angeles, have taught me this.

Yet every day our effectiveness is diminished because immigrants living and working in our communities are afraid to have any contact with the police. A person reporting a crime should never fear being deported, but such fears are real and palpable for many of our immigrant neighbors.

This fear is not unfounded. Earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that 11 more locations across the United States have agreed to participate in a controversial law enforcement program known as 287(g). The program gives local law enforcement agencies the powers of federal immigration agents by entering into agreements with Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Although many local agencies have declined to participate in 287(g), 67 state and local law enforcement agencies are working with ICE, acting as immigration agents.

Some in Los Angeles have asked why the LAPD doesn't participate. My officers can't prevent or solve crimes if victims or witnesses are unwilling to talk to us because of the fear of being deported. That basic fact led to the implementation almost 30 years ago of the LAPD's policy on immigrants, which has come to be known as Special Order 40. The order prohibits LAPD officers from initiating contact with someone solely to determine whether they are in the country legally. The philosophy that underlies that policy is simple: Criminals are the biggest benefactors when immigrants fear the police. We can't solve crimes that aren't reported because the victims are afraid to come forward to the police. [Emphasis added]

That L.A.'s Chief of Police can see what has long been obvious (or should have been) should come as no surprise. What is remarkable (although it shouldn't be) is that the head of a department facing draconian budget cuts because of the disastrous financial state of the city and the state would rather not take the easy money from the feds to do their work, preferring instead to adhere to a policy that has proven to be effective in local police work. The city of Los Angeles has been the better for his decision in this regard as well as for his other efforts.

Like I said: I'm sorry he's leaving.

Sunday Is Free

Well, Sunday Agbata isn't actually free, but at least he's out of jail for the first time in eleven months. I posted on Mr. Agbata's dilemma on June 2 of this year. Arrested by immigration officials after being discovered as a stowaway on a boat from West Africa, Mr. Agbata was ordered deported. Then, for eleven months he sat in jail waiting for that to happen, even though courts have held that no one ordered deported can be held in jail for longer than six months unless there are extraordinary circumstances. Obviously ICE couldn't come up with any extraordinary reason for holding him.

From the Boston Globe:

A federal judge has ordered the release of a Nigerian immigrant who was jailed for 11 months after he was ordered deported, ruling that immigration officials had failed to justify detaining him for so long.

In his ruling issued last week, US District Judge Joseph L. Tauro ordered federal officials to release Sunday Agbata, a 27-year-old former auto factory worker. ...

Tauro wrote that ICE had failed to provide any evidence that Agbata was uncooperative - and had also failed to notify Agbata in writing about his alleged lack of cooperation, as required.

“The government has failed to identify any instance of willful noncompliance,’’ the judge wrote in a four-page decision issued Thursday. “Vague assertions that he refused to cooperate do not justify [Agbata’s] continued detention absent specific information about what more [he] could have done.’’ [Emphasis added]

The reason the government failed to identify an extraordinary reason for the continued detention is that there was none. Mr. Agbata was left moldering in his cell because he just wasn't all that important to ICE. They'd get around to him, sooner or later. It's not that he was lost in a shuffle of paper work. He had lawyers working diligently to provide the information the government wanted, and they contacted the appropriate authorities, updating them as necessary. The response from the government to such updates were always the same: he'd be deported "real soon, now."

Mr. Agbata wasn't a terrorist, or even much of a criminal: the only crime he had committed was trying to sneak into the country so that he could have a better life. It's a crime that hundreds of detainees in jails around the country have committed, many of whom are also just sitting and waiting.

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder have some house cleaning to do. Their departments need a little shaking up so that these travesties don't continue.

This Land Is My Land

That border fence your dollars are building to keep out those illeguls will have cost you a lot even if the next administration gets in and acts like responsible adults. The boondoggle that border officials are describing as a 'speed bump', that innumerable tunnels are now bypassing, may be killed soon. But the insanity continues unabated now.

As Rio Grande Valley property owners gird for hearings that will determine how much the government pays for the land it takes to build the border fence, some are struggling to find a key witness — an appraiser.
(snip)
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is trying to complete 670 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. It will not meet its end-of-year deadline, but has promised to have all sections under contract by then.

Some landowners in the Rio Grande Valley, where the project has been delayed by litigation, hope that a new administration will rethink the controversial project. Earlier this month Customs and Border Protection announced it was putting off three fence sections totaling about 14 miles in the Valley to further study their impact on Rio Grande floodwaters.

Richard Schell, another attorney representing border fence property owners, said he usually turned to the firm of Robinson, Duffy & Barnard LLP in Harlingen for appraisals involving litigation, but the government had them sewn up. So far the firm has been included on the government's witness list in only one case in Cameron County. No one from the firm returned calls for comment.

If appraisal work for these cases costs more than $10,000, Schell said one client would have to forego the outside expert and testify to the value himself.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen extended the deadline for naming experts by a month for a group of cases, including those handled by Villegas and Schell. They are scheduled to go to trial in March if Hanen opts for jury trials rather than a court-appointed land commission to determine compensation.

Bud Campana, a Brownsville appraiser not handling any border fence cases, said he was approached by a landowner this summer but was not comfortable with the job.

"The problem with these appraisals is it's a unique circumstance," Campana said. A big part of an appraisal is comparing the property to the sales of similarly affected pieces of land. But there is still nothing to compare the fence to, he said.

Some of the properties are further complicated by issues involving hunting leases, access to the Rio Grande and the value of land accessible — but in a more limited fashion — on the Mexican side of the fence.

"Based on what I've seen and generally heard I think it's a shame the way some property owners have been run over and treated," Campana said.

Once upon a time this was supposed to 'protect' the residents of this country. Now that the Department of Homeland Security has taken it in hand, it has become an affliction and denial of homeowner rights.

The insane idea of putting fence along the stretch of border that runs from Texas all the way to the Pacific Ocean has already entailed any number of disputes, one of them the proposed division of the campus of the University of Texas at Brownsville by that fence. That DHS idea has been shot down, but not before it went to court and cost us taxpayers to defend the ridiculous plans DHS was proposing.

The adult oversight of competent officials would be a welcome change, especially in the matter of trying to fence in vast spaces of land instead of providing legal channels for jobseekers and employers to use.

As I have said previously, Fence This:

Today On Page One

The NY Times got the placement of this article right. It's on page one, where it deserves to be.

Mr. Ng’s death follows a succession of cases that have drawn Congressional scrutiny to complaints of inadequate medical care, human rights violations and a lack of oversight in immigration detention, a rapidly growing network of publicly and privately run jails where the government held more than 300,000 people in the last year while deciding whether to deport them.

In federal court affidavits, Mr. Ng’s lawyers contend that when he complained of severe pain that did not respond to analgesics, and grew too weak to walk or even stand to call his family from a detention pay phone, officials accused him of faking his condition. They denied him a wheelchair and refused pleas for an independent medical evaluation.

Instead, the affidavits say, guards at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., dragged him from his bed on July 30, carried him in shackles to a car, bruising his arms and legs, and drove him two hours to a federal lockup in Hartford, where an immigration officer pressured him to withdraw all pending appeals of his case and accept deportation.

When a judge finally ordered that Mr. Ng receive the medical care he obviously needed, wildly metastasised cancer was discovered. He died a few days after the diagnosis.

Now, it's clear that the condition pre-existed the detention, but the fact is Mr. Ng didn't received any medical care worth the title while he was being detained. Some pain killers were dispensed for his excruciating back pain, but even those were stopped when the 34-year old was too weak to stand up to receive them. The guards just assumed he was faking it.

In federal court affidavits, Mr. Ng’s lawyers contend that when he complained of severe pain that did not respond to analgesics, and grew too weak to walk or even stand to call his family from a detention pay phone, officials accused him of faking his condition. They denied him a wheelchair and refused pleas for an independent medical evaluation.

Go read the whole article. The details will horrify you. Then consider, as I am doing right now, what this story says about what we've become over the last seven years.

I am deeply ashamed.

More Whine, Please

The Department of Homeland Security doesn't like being subjected to Congressional oversight: it's too time consuming and apparently too confusing. At least that's the tenor of this op-ed piece authored by Stephen R. Heifetz, the deputy assistant secretary for policy development at the Department of Homeland Security published in today's NY Times.

IN a city known for paralyzing bureaucratic turf fights, one of the most debilitating and potentially disastrous has received scant attention: it’s the Congressional mess that produces tangled homeland security laws. This tangle obstructs our ability to prioritize risks at the Department of Homeland Security, where I work alongside more than 200,000 colleagues, almost all of us civil servants (not political appointees) who will remain in place after the election. ...

Roughly 80 committees and subcommittees oversee the Department of Homeland Security and its subcomponents. By way of comparison, the Department of Defense works primarily with four committees. [Emphasis added]

While I tend to agree that Congress needs to revamp their committee system to accommodate the mish-mash known as Homeland Security, I don't think DHS deserves only four committees, or even a dozen. As it is presently constituted with everything from FEMA to TSA housed in that one department, it is in our interests to keep a sharp eye on people who insist on speaking in terms such as "prioritize."

Mr. Heifetz hardly does his argument any favors by pointing to 9/11, the sole reason for this massive reorganization:

To appreciate the challenge we face, it is important to remember that the Sept. 11 terrorist attack was a classic “low-probability, high-consequence” event. In the pre-9/11 era, if experts had generated a list of risks to our country — various terrorist attacks, hurricanes, contagious diseases and so on — they probably would have concluded that terrorists flying planes into skyscrapers and government buildings was unlikely, in light of the security and logistical obstacles the terrorists would have to overcome. While those experts would have acknowledged that such an attack would have grave results, before 9/11, relatively few people worried about such low-probability, high-consequence security events. After 9/11, however, many people began thinking about a broad range of such attacks.

Actually, a better date might have been selected. I'm thinking 8/6 might be the leading candidate. That was the date President Bush sloughed off the PDB which warned of an imminent terrorist attack by Al Qaeda. The CIA and other intelligence agencies, including the FBI knew something was afoot. Our president wasn't interested. Perhaps he should have asked a few questions, brought some pressure to bear on fleshing out that warning, but he just wasn't interested.

The whole point of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was to facilitate information sharing among the various agencies involved in, well, actual homeland security. But, as often happens in Washington, people got carried away, with the result that little old ladies have to take their shoes off at the airport and over a million Americans who occasionally have to travel find that their names are on a 'no-fly' list for absolutely no good reason.

The DHS doesn't need less oversight, it needs more, even if that oversight is carried out by fewer committees.

Sorry, Mr. Heifetz. You'll have to do better. So will your colleagues.

Fencing Off UT

While the border fence seems to live in the right wing alternate universe as an assault on the illegal immigration issue, reasonable people agree it is farcical. The picture I took on the roads near Del Rio, Texas, shows the country of Mexico running along in the distance, a border that goes on and on and on and on.

Recently, The New Republic did a rather comprehensive explication of that odd juxtaposition of the mythical fence and the facts, a rather jaggedy line.

In this political season, immigration is the issue that everyone's taking pains not to discuss. The presidential candidates are merely paying the same lip service to border security. Congress has all but abandoned comprehensive immigration reform, and the Bush administration continues to pile all their immigration-policy eggs in the border-security basket. But that doesn't mean nothing is happening. Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff, in an April trip to the U.S.-Mexico border, made clear his determination that 670 miles of border fence, already under construction in Arizona and California, be completed by the end of the year. The border fence project has faced embarrassments--illegal immigrants employed to build the wall, a "Virtual Fence" project that cannot distinguish humans and vehicles from livestock and bushes--but those setbacks pale in comparison to its fundamental flaws. Below, six simple reasons a fence spanning the U.S.-Mexico border is bad policy:

It doesn't work. Most experts say that physical fencing would not drastically decrease the number of illegal immigrants entering the country. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that as much as 40-50 percent of the U.S.'s unauthorized migrant population entered the country through legal ports of entry, either with nonimmigrant visas that subsequently expired (known as "overstayers") or by using a Border Crossing Card that allows for short visits to the border region. A fence spanning the border would not prevent their entry to the country.

Of course, there are five other reasons in the article, but the primary one really makes the others extraneous. Of course, I recommend you read them all, if you have the time.

Today the DHS was ordered to get its act together, and re-do the proposed fence location which would cut across the campus of UT Brownsville - yes, you read right. Among many other idiotic lines drawn for the proposed fence is one to cut a campus into sections - to keep the illeguls from crossing it? Right.

A federal judge ordered a Texas university and the government Monday to continue meeting in search of alternatives to building a border fence across campus.

U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen said the government had not complied with his March order to work with the University of Texas at Brownsville to come up with a better plan than the one that puts more than a quarter of the school's acreage – including the golf course – behind the U.S.-Mexico border fence.

Judge Hanen's order dealt the Department of Homeland Security a rare setback in its rush to meet a congressional deadline to have 670 miles of fencing built along the U.S.-Mexico border by the end of the year.

In documents filed with the court before Monday's hearing, the government said it had concluded that the fence through the campus was the only viable alternative and indicated that it could file a condemnation lawsuit against the university as early as today.

Judge Hanen told both sides to get the necessary expertise and authority in the same room to come up with a solution.

"It's important enough for the security of the country and important enough to the integrity of the college to try to do this," Judge Hanen said.

They are scheduled to report back to the judge by July 31.

The irrational solution to the irrational order to fence the border is fitting, in a way. The mad hatters are having a tea party, and it all is bizarre. Worst of all, this is coming out of taxpayers' money, and diverting funds that could have been very well utilized doing anything rational at all.

203 Days

Prohibition Boosts Criminals

One of the ironies of the Prohibition era was that criminal activity was given a big boost when legal manufacture of alcoholic beverages was ended. Anyone who wanted a drink had to commit an illegal act.

This principal is evoked in our present border fence circus. A ludicrous mime of giving America security by fences on the border has created any number of sideshows (not the pleasant kind, like Avedon's). We have pieces of property along the border being encroached on, split, and confiscated by the federal government - as long as they don't belong to friends of the war criminals. We can see any number of films of illegal immigrants scaling, boring through and tunneling under the existing fences. Good sense is not a factor in the "security" fence being touted by the DHS.

Predictably, with the infamous criminal element in the executive branch making their illicit gains by promoting the ludicrous, there is a growing element along the border taking a cut out of the same traffic.

It should surprise no one that people smugglers along the U.S.-Mexico border are adopting the same routes and tactics employed by major drug traffickers. Illegal immigrants are willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to ride in the hollowed-out spaces and false bottoms of vehicles crossing the border.

For smuggling groups, human cargo is highly profitable and far less risky than moving drugs. For immigrants, this is the quickest and surest way to get into the United States. Studies in recent years indicate that as border enforcement tightens, demand jumps for these smugglers. So do profits. According to one U.S. specialist, Mexican border smugglers are sitting atop a $5 billion industry.

That's why corruption is growing rapidly among the U.S. border patrol officers charged with stopping it. Like drug traffickers, people smugglers are targeting American law enforcement personnel whose low pay makes them susceptible to the lure of bribery. When enforcers look the other way and wave smuggling vehicles through, America's illegal immigrant population grows.
(snip)
A better way to halt this scourge is through comprehensive reform of America's immigration laws, giving immigrant workers greater access to legal jobs in this country though a guest-worker program.

There needs to be a well-structured system that tells immigrant workers: If you abide by the system, you can come out of the shadows and work legally. Tougher workplace enforcement, coupled with a well-defined pathway to regularization for existing immigrants, would help thin the ranks of illegal migrants and reduce demand for people smugglers.

Congress' failure to enact comprehensive immigration reform is a major reason smuggling rings are thriving and corruption among our border officials is rising. Immigration reform won't halt corruption, but it will dramatically reduce the illicit market that keeps the smugglers in business.

Setting up unrealistic controls at the border is nothing but a boondoggle, and promotes crime. The cynicism of this occupied white house is so great that nothing embarrasses its personnel. Hacks in high office love the opportunities for graft, and use it accordingly. No wonder that the other criminal elements take their cut as well.

Sane, reasoned policy will be a welcome relief when this bunch of petty thieves is finally swept out.


******************************************************

After an interesting discussion this morning in Eschaton comments about the many uses of hemp, an ideal switchgrass, I was fascinated to turn up this transcript of a film made in WWII to promote planting hemp for wartime usage:

Long ago when these ancient Grecian temples were new, hemp was already old in the service of mankind. For thousands of years, even then, this plant had been grown for cordage and cloth in China and elsewhere in the East. For centuries prior to about 1850 all the ships that sailed the western seas were rigged with hempen rope and sails.

For the sailor, no less than the hangman, hemp was indispensable. A 44-gun frigate like our cherished Old Ironsides took over 60 tons of hemp for rigging, including an anchor cable 25 inches in circumference. The Conestoga wagons and prairie schooners of pioneer days were covered with hemp canvas. Indeed the very word canvas comes from the Arabic word for hemp. In those days hemp was an important crop in Kentucky and Missouri. Then came cheaper imported fibers for cordage, like jute, sisal and Manila hemp, and the culture of hemp in America declined.

But now with Philippine and East Indian sources of hemp in the hands of the Japanese, and shipment of jute from India curtailed, American hemp must meet the needs of our Army and Navy as well as of our Industry. In 1942, patriotic farmers at the government's request planted 36,000 acres of seed hemp, an increase of several thousand percent. The goal for 1943 is 50,000 acres of seed hemp.

Lots of fun with this transcript, which goes on to laud the noble seed. And of course, hemp is illegal to grow in this country, although it is not the same as marijuana.

The Alice In Wonderland Tea Party

The Department of Homeland Security is a real piece of work. It has an enormous budget and has absorbed all sorts of disparate agencies. It's job is allegedly to keep the United States safe and secure, and to do that job it dispenses millions upon millions of dollars to states to accomplish that mission. Unfortunately, the DHS, especially as led by Michael Chertoff, only sees one threat to our security: Al Qaeda. A fine example of that narrow focus was presented in this article published in today's NY Times.

Juliette N. Kayyem, the Massachusetts homeland security adviser, was in her office in early February when an aide brought her startling news. To qualify for its full allotment of federal money, Massachusetts had to come up with a plan to protect the state from an almost unheard-of threat: improvised explosive devices, known as I.E.D.’s. ...

The demand for plans to guard against improvised explosives is being cited by state and local officials as the latest example that their concerns are not being heard, and that federal officials continue to push them to spend money on a terrorism threat that is often vague. Some $23 billion in domestic security financing has flowed to the states from the federal government since the Sept. 11 attacks, but authorities in many states and cities say they have seen little or no intelligence that Al Qaeda, or any of its potential homegrown offshoots, has concrete plans for an attack.

Now I can well imagine Ms.Kayyem's astonishment. As the article noted, it is far more likely that Massachusetts highways will be the scene of chemical spills than planted explosive devices, but the DHS doesn't consider chemical spills caused by traffic accidents to be particularly important from a safety and security standpoint. That's too much of a local issue. And Al Qaeda wouldn't be involved.

Now, Mr. Chertoff's refusal to allow for "mission creep" would kind of make sense (sort of) if the Department of Homeland Security hadn't sucked FEMA into its portfolio, and if a whole lot of money that used to go to assist state and local police departments in dealing with such issues as drug trafficing and multistate gangs hadn't also been sucked into the DHS budget.

It also would kind of make sense (sort of) if the DHS had some solid information about Al Qaeda plans for another attack and had transmitted that information to the appropriate agencies in the states. Whether Mr. Chertoff has such information is moot, since he hasn't bothered to tell anyone who would need to know anything about such attack plans.

Here's what I suspect this is all about. During a DHS meeting, or (and this is more likely) at the water cooler, somebody remarked about how many of the US troops were killed or injured around Baghdad by I.E.D.s. Mr. Chertoff overheard the conversation, slapped his forehead and said, "Oh, my God! I.E.D.s. That's what they'll do. We'd better put together a program to stop those infernal Al Qaeda operatives, and quick. Somebody get the White House on the phone. I need more money."

Moron.

239 days.

Just A Little Humanity, Please

About two dozen relatives (wives, husbands, children) of people who died in the 9/11 attack have had to live anonymously since that day, not able to openly attend memorial services or even to mention to neighbors that loved ones were lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Why the secrecy? They are illegal immigrants fearful of being subject to extortion and (even worse) deportation. An article in today's NY Times announced that these people have been given some hope from an unlikely source, the Department of Homeland Security.

Federal officials on Thursday opened a path to temporary legal status for illegal immigrants whose spouses or parents died on 9/11, a step the families’ supporters called a breakthrough in the effort to allow them to remain permanently in the United States.

Lawyers for the immigrants said a concession by Homeland Security officials would help to bring the family members out of the shadows. They also said the measure should help clear a political logjam that has stalled bills in Congress that would grant the immigrants permanent legal status.

The reason for the congressional logjam is absolutely chilling: some members of Congress didn't want to extend the privilege of continued residence in the country to criminals and terrorists. That meant that the surviving families had two choices: one, come out to the immigration authorities, establish that they were neither criminals nor terrorists, and hope for mercy; or, two, keep hiding behind anonymity and hope for the best. It's not hard to understand why these families chose the second option.

Fortunately, many of them had lawyers, and one of those lawyers, Debra Brown Steinberg, contacted the DHS to see if something could be done in such a fashion to open up the process without the threat of deportation hanging around on the fringes. She finally got the answer she and her clients could live with.

Stewart A. Baker, an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security, said in a letter to Ms. Steinberg that under the new procedure the illegal immigrants could provide biographical information and immigration history to the authorities without revealing their names, with the assurance that the information would not be used to deport them.

Homeland Security officials will use the information to decide whether to give the immigrants a temporary humanitarian parole to allow them to live and work legally in the United States, Mr. Baker wrote. The parole would not be granted to immigrants with criminal records, ties to terrorism or formal orders of deportation, he said.

Now, there. Was that so hard? Just a little humanitarian gesture that is going to be the source of some hope for people who lost as much as anyone else on 9/11. It took over six years, but the government has finally done what governments are supposed to do: provide some protection and some help to those who need it.

For Christ's Sake!

Just when I think this country is beginning to grow beyond its xenophobic and racist past, an article such as this one punctures my optimism.

A school security officer stopped Karina Acosta, an 18-year-old pregnant Roswell High School senior, and discovered she was in the country illegally. He called federal immigration authorities, who swiftly deported her.

The district superintendent protested and the officer was removed from the school and transferred back to the city Police Department. About three dozen angry students and parents marched on police headquarters -- a notable event in a town not accustomed to controversy -- and were met by a handful of counterdemonstrators who backed the officer.

The schools suffered a sudden drop in attendance as students whose parents were in the country illegally kept them home. The local newspaper was peppered with angry letters to the editor denouncing illegal immigrants. And even two months later, unease permeates the community. [Emphasis added]

Imagine: an 18-year-old, pregnant, in her last year of high school, sent back to Mexico without her family. Then consider this: the action by the Roswell police officer assigned to the school was illegal under a US Supreme Court decision dating back to 1982. Perhaps it would help if I mentioned that his last name was Corn...an unusual last name in New Mexico, which has a huge Hispanic population. Perhaps it would also help if I mentioned (as the article did) that Officer Corn has a history of forcing Latino students to prove they were in the country legally and had at least one other hight school student deported in the past.

His excuse and that of his police chief?

But local police forces like Roswell's are increasingly being pressured to crack down on illegal immigrants.

Pressured by whom? The article doesn't explicity address the question, but quotes several residents who make it clear that they are unhappy that the "illegals" are crowding the classrooms. I'm sure the DHS and INS had nothing to do with it, just as I am sure I can purchase very profitable commercial property in the Everglades.

This is what it has come down to. This is what "compassionate conservativism" has brought us.

Once again, I am deeply ashamed of this country.

Your Homeland Is Belong To DHS

Your friendly Department of Homeland Security wants to make sure you know it means business when it's charged with securing your homeland. When it's secured your home in the style it likes, you are no longer the owner/occupier, it's theirs. While that may seem like a small misreading to you here on this post, for those whose homelands are being swallowed up as part of the usual misfeasance by the occupied White House, it's a personal tragedy.

That ever-so-dumb fence that keeps threatening our border with terminal stupidity is being located on land that has owners, residents, those subversive types who keep telling crony Chertoff that he's not supposed to 'secure' their property into his pocket instead of protecting it. They have much more to fear from DHS than from the traffic that goes over our land but leaves them still owning it.

Owners who haven't lain down so our fear mongers could ride over them are being slapped with suits to take rights to their property away from them.

Michael Friel, spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, said the government's recent actions don't involve taking anyone's property.

"These court actions are only petitions for temporary easement in order to perform land assessments," he said. "Customs and Border Protection has sought access to border properties to conduct the necessary engineering, environmental and other assessments that will help make a final determination of the location for placing security barriers."

To a large degree, the government has received the needed access, he said.

"But in some cases, we have not," he said, "which is why we've moved forward to petition the courts to provide access."

Border property owners in the Rio Grande Valley are afraid they're next. And they don't like it.

Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster says they have every need to be worried.

"Folks in the Valley should be nervous, as should every American," he said. "This is a violation of the rights of property. I have come to a new appreciation for the consistency of the Department of Homeland Security. They are consistently sneaky and underhanded."

Mr. Foster said the court order by a federal judge in Del Rio forcing the city to temporarily make the downtown property available to the government was issued Monday – the day before Eagle Pass was served with notice of the government's suit.
(SNIP)
The Dec. 7 letter from the Corps of Engineers spelled out for property owners what might happen if a decision were made to build a fence on their land.

"If after negotiations with you, we are unable to agree on a price for the necessary property, the Government will return to court to seek title and possession, and the court will determine fair market value," the letter read. (Emphasis addded.)

This is the sort of protection that usually is followed by 'racket'. Has our executive branch even the slightest idea of what it's like to respect citizens' rights? If it does, it's hiding it really very well. The hare-brained scheme that a totally irresponsible 109th Congress sloughed off onto the border, an ephemeral fence to keep out brown folks from the south, is being carried out by an equally irresponsible posse from the DHS in defiance of reason and the rights of landowners.

The fence itself is a joke, and as Sen. Kennedy and other opponents have said any number of times, to paraphrase, 'show me a ten foot fence and I'll show you an eleven foot ladder'.

The landowners' rights being trammeled are the sort of possession that we are being 'protected' from. If you would like to be protected by this bunch, you can save yourself court costs and just leave.

If you want to vote them all out of their undeserved offices, the primary in Texas is March 4th (consider that a command), and in November we can make it final. Get the crooks out of high office, or they're taking your land in every way you can imagine.

It's Time To Grow Up

Director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff has managed once again to stick his foot in his mouth, and this time even Republicans are outraged, according to this AP article:

A driver's license won't be good enough to get Americans past a checkpoint at the Canadian or Mexican border, Chertoff said. That will be a surprise to many people who routinely cross the border with Canada, but Chertoff bristled at criticism that such extra security would be inconvenient. More than 800,000 people enter the U.S. through land and sea ports each day.

"It's time to grow up and recognize that if we're serious about this threat, we've got to take reasonable, measured but nevertheless determined steps to getting better security," he said in an interview with The Associated Press. [Emphasis added]

Some folks in the northern tier of states are obviously not happy about having to get passports to travel to and from Canada, nor are they happy that Canadian tourists and shoppers are going to have to do the same thing. What triggered the real outcry was the rather insulting language Mr. Chertoff used to justify the new travel rules.

Congressional critics representing Northern border states were anything but impressed with Chertoff's rhetoric.

His department has proved incapable of implementing a 2004 law on border security, and Chertoff "frankly has as much credibility on telling people to 'grow up' as Geoffrey the Giraffe," said Rep. Tom Reynolds, a Buffalo-area Republican.

Added Sen. Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican, "Secretary Chertoff's comments that those objecting to the plan need to 'grow up' indicates that the department still doesn't understand the practical effects of DHS policies on the everyday lives of border community residents."

Sen. Patrick Leahy, Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the move does nothing to enhance security and will only hurt the economy. "When it comes to the Northern Border, the muddled thinking and poor planning at DHS seems to have no bounds, and the agency that botched Katrina seems to have no shame and no memory to boot," Leahy said.

But Mr. Chertoff wasn't content with just insulting those who live near the border. To bolster his argument for the new travel papers he raised a familiar administration cry:

Not moving to the new restrictions would be a tragic mistake, Chertoff said. "I can guarantee if we don't make this change, eventually there will come a time when someone will come across the border exploiting the vulnerabilities in the system and some bad stuff will happen. And then there'll be another 9/11 commission and we'll have people come saying 'Why didn't we do this?'"

Hey, it's worked for over six years...why not use it again?

Not Quiet On Southern Front

This is the border you're paying to fence.

Border security may conjur up visions of illegals wading the Rio Grande and Tom Tancredo advertising terror attacks by brown people, but still the Department of Homeland Security is doggedly proceeding with plans to put up that infamous fence it has postulated. Opposed by border police officials, Governor Perry of Texas, border merchants who are being boycotted by infuriated Mexican buyers, But still refusing to consult on the matter, DHS is the newest advocate of Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, without apologies to Robert Frost.

Along the border many residents also are refusing to give up their land to enable the quixotic idea of keeping out those invading hordes by putting up a fence. DHS is giving them warning today, they're determined to commit the atrocity they've planned and next it's the courts. Myself, I think one look at the Big Bend area pictured above and you will see it's ridiculous to think a little fence is going to sterilize our border. And I am hopeful that if it gets to court there will be sane judges on the bench at the time.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is giving Texas landowners opposed to a border fence one last chance to allow access to their land before he takes court action against them, a Texas senator said Thursday.

Sen. John Cornyn said letters from the Department of Homeland Security are expected to go out today. But for those who refuse to provide the temporary access, the department would likely seek a court order to enter the property, he said.

"He assured me that negotiations would continue and his hope is the vast majority of these cases could be resolved without litigation – maybe in a handful of cases litigation would be required," he said.

Some residents in the Rio Grande Valley, where opposition to the fence is most fervent, have refused to let federal officials on their land. Earlier this year, Brownsville Mayor Pat Ahumada refused to sign documents allowing workers access to city property.

A Homeland Security Department spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

President Bush last year approved 700 miles of fencing and barriers on the U.S.-Mexico border to stop illegal immigration and smuggling. Unlike other states, most land in Texas is in private hands.

"All that will do is fire people up more down here," John McClung, president of the Texas Produce Association, said of the impending letters.
(snip)
Opponents have said federal officials have failed to keep them fully informed on fence plans and refused to listen to residents' proposals for alternatives. Others say the fence is a waste of taxpayers' money and will hurt border economies.

The occupied White House is amassing a psychotic record on so many fronts, it's beginning to wear down credulousness. Another incidence of insane wastrel spending is just another 'brick in the wall'. This one needs to be listed very high on the accumulating reasons that the whole executive branch should be wearing white coats that has sleeves tied in the back.

A wall is in itself ridiculous, as Sen. Ted Kennedy has often noted, because if it's ten feet high, there will always be eleven foot ladders. For anyone who remembers the Berlin Wall, it was constantly breached. But psychologically, it seems, the DHS has committed to this absurdity, and like the cretin in chief, you don't confuse them with the facts, their minds are made up.

This is Alice in Wonderland behavior. Maybe if they take another bite of their cookie, they will outgrow it. Or the courts, as I hope, may see reality and make an end of this nonsense.

Raid!

This past week several companies were raided for hiring illegal immigrants. Swift, a major meat packer, and several smaller companies were hit and fined, and undocumented workers hauled off to who-knows-where. Many employers are upset by the raids, complaining that current hiring rules are so confusing that they are unsure just how to proceed when selecting employees. This article in today's LA Times is clearly sympathetic to the employers' plight.

"Employers are very much hamstrung — if they go too far, they run the risk of a discrimination lawsuit," said David J. Ceccanecchio, an attorney for Wolf Block in Philadelphia who advises businesses that hire immigrants. "If they accept documents at face value, they run the risk" of becoming targets of stepped-up federal enforcement of immigration laws.

In the last year, the federal government has arrested 716 individuals for employing illegal immigrants, compared with 25 in 2002. In addition to the Swift raids last week, a Southern California fence-building company was fined $5 million for employing illegal immigrants, and two Florida men were each sentenced to more than four years in prison for "leasing" illegal workers to various companies.

...Federal law requires businesses to have job applicants fill out an I-9 form and to verify that the person can legally work in the United States by checking documents — usually a Social Security card and photo identification. But employers are prohibited from asking for additional documentation to prove legal residency.

Unless the documents appear to be forged, employers must accept them and verify Social Security numbers with the Social Security Administration — a process that can take months. [Emphasis added]

The employers, according to the article, are in that uncomfortable position between a rock and a hard spot. Still, one can't help but feel there is some misplaced sympathy going on here, and as one goes deeper into the article, that feeling becomes more pronounced.

Even if employers receive a "no-match" warning that workers' identities don't correspond to their Social Security numbers, their next move is a matter of dispute.

The Cincinnati clothing manufacturer Cintas Corp., which employs 32,000 people nationwide, this fall began to require its workers to resolve discrepancies within 63 days or be placed on unpaid leave. Religious leaders and unions trying to organize Cintas workers protested, and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), incoming chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, warned the company in a letter last month that it may be violating anti-discrimination laws.

Cintas is not the only company to take such a step. Last month, Smithfield Foods Inc. fired a few dozen workers at a Tar Heel, N.C., slaughtering plant who had received "no-match" letters. A thousand workers walked off the job in protest, and Smithfield rehired the dismissed laborers, giving them time to resolve the problem.

Labor groups contended that Smithfield, which a federal court ruled in May had harassed union backers, was trying to stifle organizing drives. But Smithfield officials said they were simply trying to do the right thing. [Emphasis added]

I think it highly possible, perhaps even probable, that many companies who rely on cheap labor count on the vulnerability of the undocumented worker to make the bottom line look healthier. What better way to thwart union organizing than to hold the threat of INS sweeps over everyone's head? And right now, the government seems perfectly willing to make those sweeps.

If these employers really wanted "to do the right thing," they would not only comply with federal law, they would pay decent wages and would stop fighting organizing efforts.

Who knows: such an approach might even increase the accessible labor pool in such a fashion that those employers wouldn't have to rely on undocumented workers to get the job done.

I know, fat chance.

And This Is Surprising, how?

We've just gone through an election season in which the GOP (including its President and Vice-President) tried to convince the electorate that Democrats couldn't be trusted on security issues. Fortunately, the electorate didn't buy into this nonsense because we now have a report that substantiates just how bogus the claim that Republicans are better at national security actually is. From the Washington Post:

Private consultants hired by the Department of Homeland Security have found widespread problems with its contracting operation, including nearly three dozen contract files that could not be located.

Files that could be found often lacked basic documentation required under federal rules, such as evidence that the department negotiated the best prices for taxpayers, according to a copy of the consultants' report obtained by The Washington Post.

...The assessment underscores complaints by department auditors and outside experts that procurement officials persistently neglected contracting responsibilities as they spent billions of dollars after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- much of it on security systems that do not work as planned. [Emphasis added]

The first thing in the article that set my teeth on edge that of the 72 contracts that the auditors requested for sampling, more than thirty couldn't be located. How does one "lose" that many contract files? But wait, there's more:

The consultants sharply criticized an array of contracting procedures. Of the 72 contract files reviewed, only 14 were deemed to be in "excellent" shape. Those files contained evidence that the contracts were awarded with adequate competition and represented the best deal for taxpayers

Forty-seven files met only "minimum" standards and showed little evidence of fair and reasonable pricing or supervision by contracting officials.

Eleven files were deemed to be "seriously inadequate," with key documents missing or incomplete and little evidence that the contracts were competitively awarded or prices were justified.

The consultants said some information in the files "seems to be just enough to 'get by.' " [Emphasis added.]

And this is supposed to feel more secure?

Heckuva job, Mr. Chertoff.