Archive

Posts Tagged ‘Department of Homeland Security’
December 5th, 2014 at 12:57 pm
Obama’s Immigration Amnesty Is NOT an Executive Order

My hat is off to Jerome Corsi at World Net Daily for confirming that President Barack Obama’s unilateral and unconstitutional immigration amnesty that affects up to five million illegal immigrants was not, in fact, given as part of an executive order.

Instead, what Obama signed in Las Vegas on November 21 – the day after he announced his intent to grant a temporary halt to some deportations and provide work permits – were documents much different.

“One was a presidential proclamation creating a White House Task Force on New Americans and the other a presidential memorandum instructing the secretaries of State and Homeland Security to consult with various governmental and non-governmental entities to reduce costs and improve service in issuing immigrant and non-immigrant visas,” reports Corsi.

As Corsi explains, “the only Obama administration document relevant to the plan announced Nov. 20 is a DHS memorandum signed by [Homeland Security Secretary Jeh] Johnson titled “Exercising Prosecutorial Discretion with Respect to Individuals Who Came to the United States as Children with Respect to Certain Individuals Who Are the Parents of U.S. Citizens or Permanent Residents.”

Getting into the ramifications of this revelation probably merits its own column, but it should be mentioned here that the Texas-led, 17 state lawsuit challenging Obama’s immigration amnesty already knew about this legal technicality and focuses its fire on Secretary Johnson’s abuse of the notice-and-comment process required of any policy change. So far, Johnson’s memorandum implementing Obama’s amnesty has not appeared in the Federal Register, as required, and thus is in clear violation of the law.

Stay tuned. The games are likely just beginning.

April 10th, 2013 at 5:24 pm
Gang of Eight Border Strategy: Let DHS Decide

The New York Times is reporting that new details are emerging about the border security component of the Senate’s bipartisan, self-appointed “Gang of Eight” plan for comprehensive immigration reform.

The following is particularly interesting:

According to the draft, the legislation would provide $3 billion for the Department of Homeland Security to draw up and carry out a five-year border security plan. Officials must present the plan within six months, and no immigrants can gain any provisional legal status until the plan is in place.

The plan must include how border authorities will move quickly to spread technology across the border to ensure that agents can see along its entire length. The authorities will also have five years to reach 90 percent effectiveness in their operations, a measure based on calculations of what percentage of illegal crossers were caught or turned back without crossing.

Homeland Security officials also have six months to draw up plans to finish any border fencing they deem necessary.

The problem with this proposal is that it puts the responsibility and the discretion over how to secure the border in the hands of the very people who are committed to keeping them open.

As I wrote last week, the Department of Homeland Security is refusing to create a metric to track border security. According to White House aides, that’s because President Barack Obama doesn’t want a distracting – and damning – focus on DHS’s failure to capture more than half of illegal border crossers to derail his push for legalization and amnesty.

Simply giving DHS $3 billion to do a job it is already on record as refusing to do is nonsensical.

Now that Congress has found the one area where the Obama administration refuses to regulate, it’s time for the people’s representatives and senators to get back in the game and pass a border security program that specifies in detail what DHS’s job is, and puts in serious penalties for refusing to implement the law.

April 20th, 2011 at 2:37 pm
Obama’s Iran-Contra?

The Daily Caller reports that House Government Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is being ignored by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) in his demand for documents pertaining to two ATF initiatives: Operation Gunrunner, and Project Fast & Furious.

No, I’m not making this up.  Here’s the thinking behind Operation Gunrunner:

…ATF allowed American guns to be smuggled into Mexico and sold to Mexican drug cartels. The goal of the program was to track the illegal weapons and drug markets after they were used in crimes and abandoned using ballistics information and serial numbers for the guns.

Operation Gunrunner is gaining particular notoriety on Capitol Hill because of the connection between tracked guns and American deaths.  William LaJeunesse of Fox News reported in March that a Gunrunner firearm was linked to the killing of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

At the time, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) complained of “getting the runaround” from the Department of Justice on its partnership with ATF on Gunrunner.  The Department of Homeland Security has also been tied to the scandal.

No wonder.  Whoever thought it would be a neat idea to intentionally sell weapons to drug lords and follow the mayhem should at least be hauled in for a congressional hearing.

Unfortunately, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) won’t allow Grassley to post the latter’s extensive documentation of the operation and cover-up, nor will he commence an investigation.

Enter Darrell Issa.  In his fight for more transparency from the Obama Administration, Issa may have found an out-of-control operation linked directly to deaths stemming from Mexico’s undeclared civil war.

If the revelations about Operation Gunrunner continue their trajectory, it may not be long before commentators see Iran-Contra in a new light.  At least then the federal government was trying to free hostages while supporting anti-Marxist guerillas.

December 17th, 2010 at 5:53 pm
DHS Mum on Downed Mexican Drone near El Paso, TX

Could it be that a loaded gun passing unnoticed through a TSA checkpoint isn’t the only foreign object slipping under the radar of Secretary Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS)?  Reports are surfacing that an unmanned drone aircraft belonging to the Mexican government crashed near a residence in El Paso, TX.  In a move that can only be explained as an attempt to confirm the suspicions of Area 51 types, DHS returned the drone before other U. S. agencies could inspect it.

So far, no one with knowledge is saying why an aircraft similar to the drones the U. S. military uses to kill insurgents in Afghanistan was flying almost a mile into American airspace.  Even more incredible is the acknowledged failure to inspect the vehicle to make sure it actually belongs to the Mexican government and not one of the sophisticated drug cartels it’s battling.

Feeling safe about that southern border yet?

June 21st, 2010 at 7:57 pm
Interior Dept. Using Environmentalism to Hinder Border Patrol

Some articles must be read in their entirety in order to believe them, and that certainly qualifies for this gem at Fox News.  Mindboggling is the only word that seems appropriate to describe the pay-to-play scheme involving annual negotiations between the Department of Interior and the Border Patrol where the latter winds up paying $50 million just to get access to the border!

What in the name of the Sierra Club is going on?  It’s an unholy alliance between the Environmental Left and the open-borders crowd that drains the Border Patrol of access and money.  The effect is an unauthorized transfer of Congressional appropriations that has the Border Patrol paying for studies on its officers’ impact on the environment.

Republicans are calling it extortion.

Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, said the kicker in the multimillion-dollar tradeoff is that the money doesn’t even guarantee the Border Patrol open access to the land. Agents still have to follow particular rules to drive into wilderness areas to pursue suspects or set up routine patrols.

“That conflict has got to be resolved,” he said. “If the Border Patrol was allowed to have free access to patrol the borders at will … it would have the same effect that they’re doing in other areas.”

Bishop in March called on Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to stop “extorting” the money from Homeland Security. “Money appropriated for border security should only be spent on making our borders more secure, and not diverted to unrelated DOI spending projects,” he said in a statement at the time. According to Bishop’s office, Salazar has not responded.

Looks like British Petroleum isn’t the only “BP” with Secretary Salazar’s boot planted firmly on its neck.

May 24th, 2010 at 12:40 pm
Toxicity of the Feds’ Alphabet Soup More Harmful than BP’s Oil

The most toxic substance floating around Louisiana’s coastline isn’t oil – it’s the confusion that comes with the federal government’s alphabet soup of bureaucracy.  Click on any article describing the feds’ response, and you get a myriad of people and institutions allegedly “in charge” of directing the cleanup activity.  So far, the heads of the EPA, Interior Department, Homeland Security, and Coast Guard have all visited the state and personally weighed in on what should be done.  Now, they are contradicting each other.

In a news conference on Sunday outside the BP headquarters in Houston, Mr. Salazar repeated the phrase that the government would keep its “boot on BP’s neck” for results. He also said the company had repeatedly missed deadlines and had not been open with the public.

Mr. Salazar added, “If we find they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, we’ll push them out of the way appropriately.”

That statement, however, conflicted with comments made only hours earlier by the Coast Guard commandant, Adm. Thad W. Allen, who said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program that the access BP has to the mile-deep well site meant that the government could not take over the lead in efforts to stop the leak.

“They are necessarily the modality by which this is going to get solved,” he said.

One of the consequences of bloated bureaucracies is overlapping areas of responsibility.  Coupled with a politician’s aversion to risk (an element of bold decision making), and the result is many people responsible, but no one is ultimately in charge.

And while they dither, 65 miles of Louisiana coastline are “oiled.”

February 26th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
DHS Loses 1,000 Computers a Year; Department Not Worried

Thanks to a report by Colorado’s Independence Institute based on FOIA requests, we now know that the Department of Homeland Security loses about 1,000 computers a year.  You read that right.  And DHS has absolutely no idea where they are.  Fear not, though, because a department spokesman assures an incredulous public that no one is at risk because there wasn’t any sensitive information on the lost computers.

Assuming that’s true, then why did DHS need the computers in the first place?  If there is nothing particularly important stored on the computers such that losing 1,000 of them in one year doesn’t impede DHS’s ability to secure the homeland, why spend taxpayer money on them?  Maybe that money could be better spent on other programs that help prevent another undie-bomber.  You know, something that helps the system “work.”

H/T: World Net Daily