department of homeland security

The International Center for Transitional Justice usually focuses on bringing to light and holding perpetrators accountable for such heinous crimes as genocide, mass murder and systematic torture, often in far-off war-torn countries with dismal human rights records.
So it’s significant that today they’ve released a report calling on the United States to follow its legal obligation [...]

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 [...]

Insanity is the Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded terrorism “alert” system, which tells you nothing except that people are capable of coloring within boxes at airports. DHS empaneled a commission to examine it. Everyone with a fourth-grade education hoped that would lead to some kind of face-saving way of scrapping the system. Because who could [...]

Time has a shocking immigration story in its Aug. 27 issue about an undocumented woman originally from Oaxaca, Mexico, who was reported to the Department of Homeland Security for deportation when she showed up at a hospital in Pascagoula, Miss., to give birth. The agency took the  newborn away and arranged to have it placed [...]

After filing a Freedom of Information Act request, the Virginia-based Americans for Limited Government obtained documents from the Department of Homeland Security detailing how its controversial report on the rise of “rightwing extremism” was put together. Among the sources (pdf): The New York Times, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and this Washington Independent story on [...]

In her big speech in New York today, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, praised the so-called “fusion centers” that serve as hubs for intelligence produced by federal agencies to be shared with local and state law enforcement. Fusion centers are a “a critical part of our nation’s homeland security capabilities,” Napolitano said. That’s [...]

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 [...]

More areas will begin allowing local law enforcement to enforce immigration law.

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 [...]