border fence

One small and largely overlooked part of the $44.1 billion Homeland Security budget that passed the Senate on Tuesday involves a provision to expand the Department of Homeland Security’s E-Verify program, which relies on the Social Security database to verify a job applicant’s immigration status. Although the GOP lost out on its efforts to make [...]

In a move being cheered by environmentalists and community groups, Congress on Tuesday sent the White House a spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security which, for the first time, excluded mandatory funding for new construction of the controversial fence along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Although the Senate in July passed an amendment to build [...]

That’s the question being asked by 43 House Democrats, who wrote a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano last week urging the administration to consider the environmental and cultural consequences of throwing up a 20-foot-tall concrete barrier at the Mexican border.
The Bush administration, empowered by Congress, waived dozens of environmental and cultural [...]

As Daphne pointed out, the Supreme Court last week declined to take up a case brought by several U.S. towns against the Department of Homeland Security for waiving a number of environmental laws during construction of the anti-immigration fence at the Mexican border.
Those waivers — effectively scrapping laws to protect drinking water, wildlife and Indian [...]

The Supreme Court today announced it won’t get involved in a lawsuit brought by El Paso and other Texas counties against Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano over construction of a border fence intended to deter illegal immigrants.
The Texas local governments had argued that Michael Chertoff, Napolitano’s predecessor, improperly waived dozens of federal laws that could [...]

We wrote a piece a few weeks back charging congressional Democrats with a kind-of silence in the face of the Obama administration’s policy to retain controversial Bush-era environmental waivers in order to expedite construction of the U.S.-Mexico border fence.
Today, Arizona Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva proves us wrong, re-introducing legislation to scrap the controversial border waivers [...]

The border fence has become something of a political minefield for President Obama.

Buried in an article about an interview President-elect Barack Obama gave to The Chicago Tribune yesterday is this little nugget that should reassure supporters of comprehensive immigration reform.
Asked if he would support the extension of the fence between the U.S. and Mexican border, Obama deferred to his nominee for the Homeland Security Department, Janet [...]

Remember those dozens of environmental laws that the Dept. of Homeland Security has scrapped in order to expedite construction of the U.S/Mexico border fence? Well, now environmentalists are saying that waiving those laws probably contributed to recently flooding in Lukeville, Ariz., as well as in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. From the Associated Press: