Homeland Security secretary to visit Arizona border

Jeh_Johnson_official_DHS_portrait TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — The secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will be visiting border operations in Arizona this week.

Jeh Johnson is expected to visit Douglas and Tucson on Wednesday.

According to his office, he will receive briefings on efforts to secure the border at the Tucson Sector headquarters of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Johnson will also meet with state and local law enforcement officials.

Arizona is one stop on a trip that will also include a visit to McAllen, Texas, on Tuesday.

Former border agent sentenced for taking bribes

Assistant U.S. Attorney Dominic Lanza said the case was “one of the most serious” Border Patrol corruption cases “in a long time.”

“This is such serious misconduct, such tarnishing of the oath,” Lanza said in asking Rosenblatt to sentence Herrera-Chiang to 15 years in prison.—AZCentral

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PHOENIX, Nov. 6 (UPI) — A U.S. judge in Phoenix Wednesday sentenced former Border Patrol agent Ivhan Herrera-Chiang to 15 years in prison for taking bribes to help drug smugglers.

Herrera-Chiang pleaded guilty in April to four felony bribery counts for taking money in exchange for information on border security enforcement, including the combination to locks on U.S.-Mexico border crossing gates, The Arizona Republic reported.

U.S. District Judge Paul Rosenblatt told Herrera-Chiang during sentencing that the ex-border agent had “done about the worst thing a law-enforcement agent could do, especially a Border Patrol agent.”

More at UPI News

Homeland agents failed to stop ATF, Fast & Furious guns from crossing border

Fifteen months before the Fast & Furious gun scandal was unmasked in public, Homeland Security agents along the Arizona border recognized that their colleagues at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were allowing illegal guns to flow across the border to Mexican drug gangs in violation of federal policy.

The agents working for Homeland’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raised objections internally to their bosses and to their ATF colleagues in late 2009 without success, but did not escalate their concerns to superiors in Washington, according to a new Homeland Security inspector general report that uncovered yet another missed opportunity inside government to stop the bungled gun trafficking investigation.

“Most Homeland Security Investigations personnel in Arizona who received information about the investigation recognized that the task force was using a flawed methodology, which was contrary to ICE policy and practices for weapons smuggling investigations,” the inspector general concluded in a little-noticed report issued late last month.

And the special agent in charge in the case for Homeland failed to appreciate that the flawed tactics in the investigation – allowing weapons to “walk” across the border – violated ICE policies, the report added.

Read more at The Washington Times

Man caught on border has rare strain of TB

Express-News
By Jason Buch
Wednesday, January 16, 2013

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is holding a young immigrant from Asia who officials say is infected with a rare drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis.

The man was detained by the Border Patrol trying to sneak into South Texas on Nov. 27.

Several days later, while undergoing a medical screening at the Port Isabel Service Detention Center, he was diagnosed with extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, the least treatable form of the disease.

Officials declined to identify the infected man other than to say he is young and from an Asian country.

It’s only the third time since 2008 the strain has been detected in Texas, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.

“This is a very rare situation, and XDR is considered to be a very dangerous disease,” said Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the department. “But it’s not easily transmitted and we have no reason to believe community exposures have occurred.”

Read more at the Williams TEA Party

Senate plan would give Napolitano the final say on border security

Under a bipartisan Senate framework, Democrats say, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano would have final say over whether the border is secure enough to put 11 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship.

If Napolitano does not provide the green light for putting illegal immigrants on a pathway to citizenship, the responsibility for judging whether the metrics for border security have been met will be given to her successor.

The early debate over immigration reform has yielded two thorny questions: What metrics will be used to determine whether the goals for border security and other safeguards against illegal immigration have been met? Who will decide whether the metrics have been achieved?

Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the lead Democratic sponsor of the bipartisan immigration reform framework unveiled this past week, said Napolitano should decide.

Read more at The Hill

Semper Fi, Unless It’s Not Convenient

By Bill O’Reilly

Jon Hammar saw combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, but his most brutal foreign experience was in Mexico. Last August, the 27-year-old former Marine corporal was incarcerated by Mexican authorities in Matamoros for trying to register an antique shotgun with customs agents. Foolishly, Cpl. Hammar followed instructions given to him by U.S. Border Patrol agents in Brownsville, Texas. He registered the gun with them and brought the paperwork to the Mexicans to get their stamp of approval in order to carry the gun through the country. Hammar and a friend were driving a Winnebago, hoping to have a nice surfing vacation with some hunting on the side.

Even though the Mexican authorities clearly saw that Hammar was trying to follow the rules, they seized the Winnebago and locked the corporal up in the notoriously corrupt CEDES prison anyway. There he was threatened by other inmates and told by guards that he could buy his way out of the hellhole by paying money to the “right people.”

Hammar’s parents, who live in South Florida, immediately contacted the State Department and were told to be patient. And so they were. Three months later, Hammar was still incarcerated and had not even seen a judge, and things were becoming increasingly desperate.

That’s when his parents gave up on the State Department and contacted the media.

Read more at Townhall.

800,000 Illegal Immigrants Ordered Deported Remain in US, Could Receive Benefits

Nearly 800,000 illegal immigrants who have been ordered deported still remain in the United States, and many of them, including convicted criminals, are getting access to “secure areas, education grants, and housing assistance” in addition to food stamps and driver’s licenses.

An audit of the verification and screening system states and the federal government use to prevent illegal immigrants from receiving benefits found it fails nearly 12% of the time.

“The failures in our sample include individuals who applied for unemployment and disability insurance, food stamps, driver’s licenses and other benefits,” the auditors said. “Several individuals had criminal records, including assault with a deadly weapon, extortion, drug convictions and other convictions such as burglary, stalking and child abuse.”

The Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s audit found that nearly “800,000 immigrants are living in the U.S. who already have been ordered deported but have not yet left — or been removed by the government — from the country.” And because the the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, which “is supposed to maintain an up-to-date list of those deportable aliens so that other government agencies are aware of their status and know they should be denied benefits,” fails nearly 12% of the time, many of these 800,000 immigrants also are illegally receiving taxpayer-funded benefits.

Read more at BreitBart

Muslim Brotherhood gives training to US agencies to fight them

Bill Whittle of PJTV spoke with two whistleblowers who alleged that the agencies tasked with protecting our country against terrorism actually receive training from those terrorist groups.

He spoke with a Department of Defense analyst and an FBI agent under conditions of anonymity.

The Defense Department analyst stated that he found much of the information on Sharia law in English. He found that Islamic law supported the position of radical terrorists groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, rather than so-called moderate groups. He claims that upper Defense Department personnel stopped using his reports. Though he said that some used his reports in support of their operations to great success.

The FBI agent remarked that much of the information he gives can be found on the Internet. He mentions the Holy Land Foundation—formerly called the Occupied Land Fund—which was shut down by the Bush Administration because it set up by the Muslim Brotherhood to funnel funds to Hamas. The Supreme Court refused to hear their case in October of this year.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was part of a coalition in support of the Holy Land Foundation. The FBI agent claims that, “…every major Muslim organization in the United States is a Muslim Brotherhood front—specifically the most prominent organization.” The three most prominent organizations, he says, are the Muslim Public Affairs Council, CAIR, Islamic Society of North America.

CAIR is Hamas, the FBI agent alleges, and ISNA is a huge Hamas entity in America. CAIR and ISNA are the two groups that the US government—including the FBI, DOD, State Department and DHS—look to to do their outreach to the Muslim community in the United States.

These groups are not included in the right-wing or left-wing extremist group reports generated by the Department of Homeland Security.

The FBI and DHS allows these groups to sit in on investigative techniques conferences. “For instance, in the FBI, the General Counsel of the FBI, Valerie Caproni, invited these Muslim organizations, as well as the ACLU and other groups in, to make sure that the investigative techniques and Attorney General guidelines and the way the FBI was going to implement the Attorney General guidelines were okay and not offensive to these organizations.”

The FBI offers no such invitations to Americans who support the Constitution.

Bill Whittle said that training in the real threat of terrorism in the United States is not given—not even to local Sheriff’s Deputies in Arizona.

SEE ALSO: FBI will not prosecute bombing of government building bombing with IED as terrorism due to “political sensitivities”-Atlas Shrugs

Pinal County forms posse

AZ Family

The Pinal County Sheriff’s Office has created an anti-smuggling possee to target drug and human smuggling because the federal government has failed to protect the border.

The newly-formed posse will be armed and scattered throughout western Pinal County, where trafficking has been known to take place.

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu said the posse will work with the county’s SWAT team in the desert to fight against Mexican drug cartels.

Read more at KTAR

Obama is hiding his part in gunrunning and Mexican murders

Univision reveals additional operations aside Eric Holder’s failed Fast and Furious.

Guest Editorial
BY ELENA LOPEZ | OCTOBER 10, 2012

Here Are Five Things You Didn’t Know About Operation Fast and Furious

The Spanish-language Univision News aired a “bombshell” hour-long report on their investigation into Operation Fast and Furious, revealing brand new evidence of international weapons smuggling by the U.S. government.

Univision News took on the job that the mainstream media in the U.S. has failed to do thus far.

They also displayed extremely disturbing images of the bloody carnage that occurred as a result of the misguided program.

Here are some things you didn’t know about Operation Fast and Furious and other gun-walking operations.

Read more at Sonoran News