Tag: United States Department of Homeland Security

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey is now required to name a Republican replacement for Kyl. After losing a year-long court battle, the Department of Education said it would cancel $150 million in student-loan debt for roughly 15,000 students. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team repudiated assertions from Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s former national-security adviser, that he had been tricked into lying to FBI agents. Flynn will be sentenced next week. The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General said it will investigate the death of a 7-year-old girl from Guatemala, who died of dehydration in the custody of Customs and Border Protection after crossing from Mexico into the U.S. illegally with her father. Today on The Atlantic How the National Enquirer Helped Trump: The tabloid secretly agreed to kill a story about Donald Trump’s alleged affair with a Playboy model—but it also published 35 covers with anti–Hillary Clinton stories. (David A. Graham) What’s Wrong With the GOP? : The Republican Party is a corrupt institution where “the higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power,” argues George Packer. Eyes on 2020: A co-chair of the Republican National Committee is leaving to head up Trump’s reelection campaign in Ohio. (Elaina Plott) Complicit in Mass Starvation: President Trump’s affinity for Saudi Arabia is prolonging the war in Yemen, and House Republicans are also complicit, argues Conor Friedersdorf.

Manigault Newman says she secretly recorded Kelly firing her in the White House Situation Room in December 2017, and she played the recording on NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday. On Monday, she released another recording, aired on NBC’s Today program, in which Trump appears to express surprise that she had been ousted. Trump hits back after Omarosa releases secret recording of president Read more The former White House aide, who had previously been a contestant on Trump’s reality television show The Apprentice, shared the recording as part of her promotional tour for her new book about her stint in the White House, Unhinged. Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs in the Department of Homeland Security, pointed to Manigault Newman’s recording device as signifying the lack of “security culture” in the Trump administration. She pointed out instances such as White House staffers working without security clearances, Trump using an unsecured phone and his 2017 dinner with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe about North Korea among diners at Mar-a-Lago. Bradley Moss, a national security lawyer in Washington, noted that it was unusual for a personnel meeting to happen in the Situation Room. In his opinion, the most obvious reason would be that the White House “had its own suspicions that she was the type of person who might try to secretly record [the meeting], and put it in the Situation Room.” Is this a security risk? Moss also told the Guardian that Manigault Newman’s use of a recording device presented counterintelligence risks. What has the White House said? “The very idea a staff member would sneak a recording device into the White House Situation Room shows a blatant disregard for our national security,” said White House press secretary Sarah Sanders.

Melania Trump’s parents were sworn in as US citizens on Thursday, completing a legal path to citizenship that their son-in-law has suggested eliminating. Viktor and Amalija Knavs, both in their 70s, took the citizenship oath at a private ceremony in New York City. Trump and Pence products of family migration they want to curb, records show Read more Lawyer Michael Wildes said the Knavses applied for citizenship on their own and didn’t get any special treatment. He confirmed that the first lady sponsored their green cards. Her husband, Donald Trump, has proposed ending most family-based immigration, which he refers to as “chain migration”. Amid a bitter debate over immigration – particularly the Trump administration’s separation of children from families crossing the border illegally – Wildes said the Knavses’ attaining citizenship was “an example of it going right”. Along with targeting illegal immigration, Donald Trump has proposed sharply curbing legal immigration. Under the law, permanent residents must live in the country for at least five years before applying for citizenship. The Knavses’ citizenship ceremony was kept hush-hush around the Jacob K Javits Federal Building. Viktor Knavs is 74, two years older than his son-in-law.

News Modal Trigger America’s top national security officials held a rare joint news briefing Thursday to highlight efforts to combat Russian election meddling — with the Department of Homeland Security chief dramatically asserting that “our democracy itself is in the cross hairs.” “Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our democracy, and it has become clear that they are the target of our adversaries who seek to sow discord and undermine our way of life,” DHS Director Kirstjen Nielsen said from the White House. “I fully share the intelligence community’s assessments and past efforts and those today to interfere with our election and of the current threat. Their appearance in the White House briefing room along with spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders came a day after President Trump yet again called the special counsel’s probe into Russian election meddling a hoax and demanded that Attorney General Jeff Sessions shut it down. Neither Wray nor Coats would directly address the president’s characterization of the probe — but they and the others insisted the threat from Russia and other actors was legit. We also know the Russians tried to hack into and steal information from candidates and government officials alike,” Coats declared. “This threat is not going away. Russia attempted to interfere with the last election and continues to engage in maligned influence operations to this day,” the top G-man said. Despite Trump’s ongoing barrage of tweets calling Russian meddling “a hoax” and Mueller’s probe a “witch hunt,” Bolton praised his boss for his actions to combat the interference that the commander-in-chief had repeatedly cast doubt on. “This includes measures to heighten the security and resilience of election systems and processes, to confront Russian and other foreign malign influence in the United States, to confront such aggression through international action, and to reinforce a strong sanctions regime.” The national security adviser, a longtime Russia hawk, also defended the president’s much-maligned press conference after his tête-à-tête with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, when Trump did not address Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. After Trump on Wednesday tweeted that Sessions should shut down Mueller’s probe, even though the attorney general had recused himself from the matter, the president’s lawyers insisted he was just stating an opinion and not issuing an order.

There is a growing outcry to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureau in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). To its credit, ICE also performs critical assignments that include investigating foreign nationals who violate the laws. If ICE is not at the border performing critical background checks and national security screenings, who does? First, the State Department consular officers screen all foreign nationals requesting a visa, employing biometric technologies along with biographic background checks. The most effective policy for interior immigration enforcement would be one prioritizing “quality of life” enforcement. “Quality of life” enforcement also would encompass stringent labor market tests (e.g., labor certifications and attestations) to ensure that U.S. workers are not adversely affected by the recruitment of foreign workers, as well as reliable employment verification systems. Including a multi-pronged agency or agencies charged with ensuring “quality of life” immigration enforcement measures as part of a package of immigration reforms would only increase the strong public support (roughly two-thirds favor) for comprehensive immigration reform. Good policy. Good politics. She has testified before Congress about asylum policy, legal immigration trends, human rights and the push-pull forces on unauthorized migration.

The president was referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a law enforcement agency within the Department of Homeland Security that bears the responsibility of carrying out his hardline immigration agenda. The list of those calling for Ice to be abolished nonetheless includes at least some prominent Democrats, such as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, both regarded as potential contenders for the 2020 presidential race. A recent poll, conducted before the controversy over Trump’s family separation policy, found Democrats with a 14-point advantage over Republicans on each party’s handling of immigration. The US Customs and Border Protection, meanwhile, was tasked with enforcement along the US borders. But the Obama administration, immigration advocates said, shifted its focus in later years by having Ice concentrate on those who committed serious felonies or were considered security risks. The overall arrests in 2017, Trump’s first year in office, were 30% higher than the previous year. The “Abolish Ice” slogan among some progressives, Fitzgerald said, probably has less to do with the agency itself than “a general cry of protest against Trump’s draconian immigration policies”. Democrats in Washington, he pointed out, have largely adopted the position that Ice should be reformed rather than eliminated in its entirety. The agents wrote that the association of Ice with the Trump administration’s controversial detention and deportation policies had made it difficult for its investigative division to pursue threats to national security, organized crime, and drug and human trafficking. “The reality is, at the end of the day, we need to have an agency that enforces immigration law and the border.” “But we need an agency that operates with humanity, with compassion … It’s not about abolish Ice so much as it is about abolish the abuses, abolish the treatment of families like they’re something less than human.”

An occupation of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) building in Portland attracted more protesters on Wednesday, growing from a rally in response to the Trump administration policy of separating parents from children at the southern border. Donald Trump signs executive order to end family separations Read more Around 6.45pm, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) vehicles blocked a facing street and moved in on the building’s western entrance. Officers parted protesters and entered the building. Quick guide Why are families being separated at US border? Why are children being separated from their families? What happens to the children? Can these children be reunited with their parents? When an influx of families and unaccompanied children fleeing Central America arrived at the border in 2014, Barack Obama’s administration detained families. Later, the driver appeared to accelerate and glancingly hit a protester, Juliette Morgans, who was filming the incident. They come here seeking safety and asylum, and they get violence protester People were spread around the perimeter of the Ice facility, blocking entrances to buildings and car parks .

While the president has falsely claimed that he has no choice on breaking up families because of a law passed by Democrats, Bush laid the blame squarely on the president's policies — namely, the Department of Justice’s "zero tolerance" policy with which it began. On Friday, Department of Homeland Security officials told reporters that 1,995 children had been separated from their parents over a six-week period, from April 19 to May 31. In her op-ed article, Bush appealed to Americans’ sense of morality and painted the policy as a dark stain on the nation’s history that she compared to the HIV/AIDS crisis and Japanese internment. "These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history. We also know that this treatment inflicts trauma; interned Japanese have been two times as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease or die prematurely than those who were not interned," she wrote. Rosalynn Carter called the policy of separating families "disgraceful and a shame to our country." Michelle Obama also weighed in to support Bush. The current first lady, Melania Trump, commented over the weekend on what's happening at the border, pushing for bipartisan cooperation to end the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border. "Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform," according to a statement from her spokeswoman. "She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart."

-Written by Elaine Godfrey (@elainejgodfrey) Today in 5 Lines During a meeting of the National Space Council, President Trump ordered the Pentagon to create a “space force,” which would be the sixth branch of the U.S. military. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen defended the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy amid mounting pressure from Democrats and Republicans to stop the separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump also chimed in, again blaming Democrats for the unfolding crisis. All 49 Democratic senators signed onto a bill prohibiting the separation of children from their families at the border, except in specific instances. California Senator Kamala Harris also went a step further—calling on Nielsen to resign. During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz defended his review of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, saying there was no “documentary evidence” of political bias. The Supreme Court avoided ruling on two major cases dealing with partisan gerrymandering in Wisconsin and Maryland, allowing the current district maps to be used in November’s midterm elections. Today on The Atlantic Should Your Child Get Hormone Therapy? : The growing awareness of gender-identity issues has made life easier for many young Americans, but, Jesse Singal writes in our July/August cover story, how should parents know when physical interventions are necessary? ‘The Sessions Doctrine’: Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s agenda is the culmination of a long legal tradition of undermining minority civil rights.

Four U.S. Companies Have Been Contracted to Build Prototype Border Walls. Caddell Construction, Fisher Industries, Texas Sterling Construction, and W.G. Yates & Sons Construction, have each been charged with building a concrete wall that's 30-feet long and up to 30-feet high, NBC News reports. The DHS is also expected to commission four non-concrete wall prototypes. On completion, the government will evaluate the designs to determine which is the most suitable to implement on a massive scale along the U.S.-Mexico border. The four contacts are each worth between $400,000 and $500,000. Read more: This Graphic Shows Why President Trump’s Border Wall Won’t Stop Immigrants From Crossing "This is the first new initiative that adds to our bigger plans," Ronald Vitiello, acting deputy commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection told NBC News. “Testing will look at things like the aesthetics of it, how penetrable they are, how resistant they are to tampering and then scaling or anti-climbing,” he added. According to Vitiello, construction will begin in the coming weeks with the review process expected to take between one and two months. [NBC News]