A recently published study (PDF), to be disseminated to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, reports that barriers built to keep out illegal immigrants are blocking black bears in Arizona from their relatives in Mexico. Border fences are choking off bear migration corridors that are already under stress from urban encroachment, according to the study authored by the Department of Agriculture’s Todd C. Atwood and Julie K. Young, and other biologists.

“While black bears are not a species of concern in [the] U.S., they are in Mexico, which represents the southern extent of their historic and current range,” the study reads, noting that border bears “may be particularly vulnerable to further loss of habitat due to urbanization and border security activities.”

The study focused on Arizona’s desert Sky Island mountain ranges, which are also home to mountain lions and jaguars and encompass one of the nation’s most biologically diverse regions.

Its findings come as the State of Arizona is soliciting private donations to build a wall in an attempt to secure the remaining 82 miles of the state’s 388-mile border with Mexico that isn’t fenced.

A mishmash of barriers currently cover about one-third of the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border with nearly half of them in Arizona and the rest equally split between California, New Mexico and Texas.

The U.S. Border Patrol first began erecting barriers in 1990 to deter illegal entries and drug smuggling in San Diego and, in 1996, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which bestowed what is now the Department of Homeland Security broad authority to construct fencing. Then in 2005, Congress passed the REAL ID Act, authorizing Homeland Security to waive all legal requirements to expedite the construction of border barriers. The Secure Fence Act of 2006 directed Homeland Security to build 850 more miles of border fencing, though that requirement was later modified to authorize fencing along not fewer than 700 miles.

Republican congressmen and women from Colorado have historically voted for federal fence-building while Democrats such as Mark Udall and Diana DeGette have opposed it and questioned the effectiveness of barriers, their cost, environmental impacts and diplomatic ramifications.

Border security doesn’t come cheap. The Government Accountability Office estimates (pdf) the federal government doled out between $400,000 to $4.8 million for every mile of border fencing it constructed and that another $6.5 billion is needed for its maintenance over the next 20 years.

Atwood, Young and the other biologists urge government officials and policymakers to identify opportunities to maintain and restore suitable wildlife habitat to protect borderland migrations.

“Currently, in the western U.S., there is opportunity to integrate connectivity conservation with land-planning. For example, land-use planners in the Tucson metropolitan area have developed a regional conservation plan with a specific focus on maintaining wildlife linkages and increasing the permeability of transportation corridors. The information we present here, if incorporated into land-use planning, may aid in ameliorating the adverse effects of inevitable urbanization and border security activities. If connectivity can be maintained, there is greater likelihood of the longterm persistence of species such as black bears, mountain lions, and jaguars along the U.S.-Mexico border.”

Sheriff Joe Arpaio (Photo: Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

Homeland Security writes:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is troubled by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) findings of discriminatory policing practices within the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO). Discrimination undermines law enforcement and erodes the public trust. DHS will not be a party to such practices. Accordingly, and effective immediately, DHS is terminating MCSO’s 287(g) jail model agreement and is restricting the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office access to the Secure Communities program. DHS will utilize federal resources for the purpose of identifying and detaining those individuals who meet U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) immigration enforcement priorities. The Department will continue to enforce federal immigration laws in Maricopa County in smart, effective ways that focus our resources on criminal aliens, recent border crossers, repeat and egregious immigration law violators and employers who knowingly hire illegal labor.

A Department of Justice report released Thursday found that Arpaio, an advocate for controversial immigration enforcement and detention measures, has committed a “wide range of civil rights violations.”

The Department of Justice states that the ongoing civil rights investigation of the Arpaio’s office found “reasonable cause to believe that MCSO, under the leadership of Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio, has engaged in a pattern or practice of misconduct that violates the Constitution and federal law.”

“We are pleased the Department of Justice report compelled the Department of Homeland Security to take steps today that should have been taken years ago,” said Chris Newman, Legal Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network in a written statement.

The Network adds:

As the DOJ report implies, DHS was an accomplice in the rights violations caused by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. DHS enabled Sheriff Arpaio to conduct his reign of terror, and expansion of the Maricopa Sheriff’s approach led to SB 1070 and to the potential Arizonification of the country. Today, the Department of Justice again acted to clean up the mess caused by failed DHS policies that enlist local police into the business of enforcing unjust immigration laws. It is time for DHS to stop contributing to the civil rights crisis described in the DOJ report and end the programs that made Arpaio’s crimes possible.”

The National Immigration Forum writes that the “Justice Department findings confirm what the American public had already suspected: Sheriff Arpaio has been more concerned with headlines than the Constitution and the law,” adding that they “also hail Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s prompt termination of the MCSO’s 287g agreement, which delegates authority for immigration enforcement to local officials, and restriction of the MCSO’s access to the Secure Communities program.”

Immigrant advocates across the U.S. have denounced Secure Communities, a highly controversial federal immigration enforcement program critics say contributes to racial profiling, demanding that the Obama administration terminate the program immediately.

Photo: Sheriff Joe Arpaio (Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee passed The Department of Homeland Security Authorization Act of 2011 Wednesday, following a two-week consideration.

Since the Committee, which is led by Connecticut Independent U.S. Rep. Joe Lieberman and Maine Republican U.S. Rep. Susan Collins, is somewhat limited in its region of authority, the bill offers a narrow pathway that is likely not to force it before additional committees in advance of a floor vote. For example, the bill does not really take up the highly-controversial matters surrounding the TSA, which falls under the purview of the Senate Commerce Committee.

Essentially, the bill focuses on streamlining the DHS. Numerous amendments were offered — some more radical than others — and the proposal was ultimately adopted on a bipartisan vote of 9-to-1 with 31 amendments.

Joe Lieberman

“The Department of Homeland Security is operating at a higher level now than at any time in the past,” Lieberman said. “But it continues to be a challenge to manage. This authorization bill translates worthy programs into statute, eliminates others, and nips and tucks to find cost savings to help the Department continue to mature and meet its missions more effectively.

“Given the current fiscal environment, I am particularly proud of a series of provisions to bring greater discipline to the Department’s acquisitions process, which could in turn save billions in taxpayer dollars now lost to waste, fraud, abuse or just plain failure.”

While the Committee was marking up the bill, Lieberman had said he viewed this process, given the number of years that had passed since DHS was created, as an opportunity to take a hard look at all the separate offices under the department, “to eliminate offices that really have not functioned or functioned well and to try to consolidate in other ways.”

It appears the Committee took that goal to heart.

The bill establishes a process for review of proposed DHS acquisitions and investments, and directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to reduce overhead costs of DHS field offices located near each other at least 5 percent by consolidating buildings and other support functions.

It eliminates the Office of Counternarcotics Enforcement and the Office of Cargo Security Policy. It also eliminates the Border and Transportation Security Directorate, the Office for Domestic Preparedness, and the Office of State and Local Government Coordination, which were abolished through administrative reorganizations. In addition, DHS will be required to consolidate its Washington headquarters at St. Elizabeths before fiscal year 2018.

The National Protection and Programs Directorate would be renamed as the Infrastructure Protection and Resilience Directorate, and the newly named organization would acquire the Federal Protective Service and Office of Infrastructure Protection.

An Office of International Travel Security and Screening would be created from a combination of U.S. Visit, the Visa Waiver Program, and the Screening Coordination Office to identify and prevent terrorist travel in or to the U.S. An electronic system would also be created that would allow for remote viewing of visa applications and to notify airlines when a traveler’s visa for entry into the U.S. has been cancelled.

Legal authorization for DHS’s intelligence activities would be provided under the National Security Act, and would codify an earlier executive order that gave the DHS Secretary authority to manage access to classified information for state, local, tribal and private sector entities. In addition, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis would be provided the ability to directly hire its own employees — an authority long since granted to others within the civilian intelligence community.

A more detailed outline of the bill, provided by the Senate Committee, is embedded below.

Susan Collins

“DHS is a more effective department than it once was. But the Department must continue to mature and reach its full potential. This first-ever authorization bill is another step toward that goal,” Collins said.

“In light of the broader fiscal crisis we face, we have produced a fiscally responsible bill. The new proposals — such as the Office of International Travel Security and Screening and improvements to the DHS acquisition system — are intended to enhance performance, consolidate functions and save money in the long run. … We want real savings — not shell-game savings.”

But all of this being said, a turf battle continues to rage between committees, especially in the U.S. House, where the Homeland Security Committee has pushed to consolidate its oversight of the department. But the House Committee Chairman, U.S. Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican, appears to be working in tandem with his Senate counterparts on scope and objective of the authorization.

“I have been working in close coordination with Senators Lieberman and Collins as both committees move toward our shared goal of reauthorizing DHS … Within the next several weeks, I will introduce and the House Homeland Security Committee will mark up a DHS authorization bill. I tend the legislation to be targeted to reduce inefficiencies and waste, consolidate functions and improve the acquisition process, while strengthening valuable homeland security programs,” King said.

Department of Homeland Security Authorization Bill 2011 Outline

The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) and NPR News Investigations released a report on the private mall’s security program Wednesday, illuminating practices that some said violates civil rights.

The security team is run by a former Israel Defense Forces’ sergeant. The teams focus on people showing “unexplained nervousness, people photographing such things as air-conditioning ducts or signs that a shopper might have something to hide,” according to the report.

In two-thirds of the interrogations the subject was a person of color or Arab descent. That’s led to at least one successful complaint to the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, according to CIR/NPR.

While defending the security methods as “part of today’s society,” Commander Jim Ryan of the Bloomington Police Department told CIR/NPR that the security approach may “infringe on some freedoms, unfortunately.”

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, told CIR/NPR that these methods violate people’s civil liberties and put authority in the hands of unaccountable private power like these security companies and the Mall of America.

“If all they’re getting for amassing suspicious activity reports on innocent people in government databases is the arrest of a few low-level turnstile jumpers and shoplifters, that doesn’t seem very sensible,” Rosen said.

CIR/NPR received 125 suspicious activity reports filed from the mall, including this common example from CIR/NPR’s database of incidents:

Mall security questioned a man with a camera on a tripod. The man “admitted he was taking photographs of the Mall of America structure” for an online photography class. He “appeared to get more nervous as the interview progressed.”

Some who were interrogated by private security had photos confiscated, were reported to police or were even enmeshed in deportation hearings after being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to the suspicious activity reports.

The Minnesota Independent has previously reported on the Mall of America’s collaboration with Homeland Security and its embrace of the “See Something, Say Something” campaign.

He cited GOP efforts to curtail abortion rights, freedom of worship — particularly non-Christian faiths — and the right for same-sex couples to marry.

Crooks and Liars has the transcript of Ellison’s remarks:

Now see, the conservatives in this body, they like to talk about liberty. And then when they’re talking about liberty they’re not talking about a woman’s right to choose, ’cause that’s liberty. They’re not talking about the freedom of worship — to be Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Bahai, no religion at all — they don’t believe in that. They believe in only one way to seek the divine and they get more radical with it every single day. They don’t believe in liberties like that. They don’t believe you should be able to say whatever you want to say, they don’t necessarily believe in the liberties that I’m talking about.

He added that “justice” in the pledge means for all and cited the controversial hearings into radicalized Islam held recently.

Now, this last part in some ways is the best part. For all. For every one. Last week we had some hearings in the Homeland Security Committee where one particular religious group was pointed out for persecution, actually. That was a sad day.

For all, though. America is about for all. For everybody. All Americans. Of whatever faith group, of whatever color, of whatever — rural or urban. Straight, gay, all of us.

Here’s the full video:

King’s hearings are being criticized as a government-sanctioned exercise in ethnic scapegoating. The question at the heart of the hearings, critics say, is accusatory. Could any group — much less a loosely affiliated ethnic or religious group– do enough to safeguard the nation from terrorism?

What’s more, as ThinkProgress pointed out Wednesday, the assumption behind the hearings is flat-out wrong. King said he believes Islamic radicalism poses the main terrorist threat to the United States. “It makes no sense to talk about other types of extremism,” he said, “when the main threat to the United States today is… al Qaida.”

Yet here are the facts as reported by ThinkProgress and compiled by the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) based on records available to everyone:

Since the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, Muslims have been involved in 45 domestic terrorist plots. Meanwhile, non-Muslims have been involved in 80 terrorist plots.

In fact, right-wing extremist and white supremacist attack plots alone outnumber plots by Muslims, with both groups being involved in 63 terror plots, 18 more plots than Muslim Americans have been involved in.

So far, King’s Homeland Security Committee does not appear to have scheduled any hearings to ask how the members of the right-wing extremist and white supremacist communities can help keep America safe from terrorism.

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Though Obama’s 2012 budget remains in legislative limbo, the figures offered within provide a meaningful glimpse into the sorts of costs government programs are expected to incur. Hellman’s breakdown sheds light on just how much money the U.S. really spends on national security.

Last week, Hellman wrote an article for political blog the Tom Dispatch in which he explained that the $558 billion Pentagon budget and the $118 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan don’t come close to depicting the whole picture of national security spending. Nuclear program maintenance, additional war and terrorism-related operational costs and homeland security all drive up defense expenses by nearly $90 billion. Intelligence, veterans programs, miscellaneous peacekeeping and counterterrorism efforts and military pensions push national security spending yet further, tipping total costs just over $1 trillion. Hellman caps that figure off with the $185 billion the U.S. must pay in 2012 in interest on standing defense debts and arrives at a sum total of $1.22 trillion. To put that number in perspective, Hellman says that a country with a gross domestic product that high would have the 15th largest economy in the world, ahead of Indonesia, Australia and Saudi Arabia.

This is a good deal higher than the number typically reported in the media — a report on defense spending that appeared on The Economist’s infographics blog today, for example, uses the base Pentagon and Iraq/Afghanistan figures to arrive at a total of $693 billion in 2010 American defense spending. The Economist uses that figure as part of a calculation determining that the ten biggest defense budgets in the world add up to more than $1.1 trillion — a number that is in fact smaller than the actual defense budget of the U.S. alone, using Hellman’s calculations.

The news that well over a trillion dollars are spent on defense every single year would likely not sit well with the general American public. Recent polls report that Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of slashing defense spending to deal with the federal deficit.

Listen to Christopher Hellman breaking down the numbers from the Tom Dispatch’s regular podcast here:

But there is another interesting tidbit in the story focusing on Browner’s work during the administration’s response to the Gulf oil spill. Politico reports that Browner was given a major role coordinating the response after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson failed to do so.

According to Politico:

Those traits served Browner well when the administration scrambled to cope with the fallout from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf. White House insiders said that Obama and Emanuel were deeply frustrated by bureaucratic tangling during the first days of the spill and felt that the response needed a strong, centralized command based in the West Wing. [...]

But aides said it was only after Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson proved unable to coordinate the massive interagency effort that Obama and Emanuel tapped Browner to quarterback.

“She knew how to put together all the pieces,” said an administration official involved in the talks.

It is clear that the threat of al Qaeda-style terrorism is not limited to the al-Qaeda core  group, or organizations that have close operational links to al Qaeda. While al Qaeda continues to threaten America directly, it also inspires its affiliates and other groups and individuals who share its violent ideology and seek to attack the United States claiming it is in the name of Islam – a claim that is widely rejected.

One of the ways DHS is approaching this threat is by beefing up the country’s network of fusion centers — groups that fuse local law enforcement work with national-level intelligence. Napolitano has made the centers a major focus of the department’s FY11 grant cycle. The idea is, as Napolitano said today, is that “in an environment where operatives may not have close links to international terrorist organizations – and where they may, in fact, be based within this country – these levels of law enforcement may be the first to notice something suspicious.”

Fusion centers don’t have the strongest records of keeping their focus on international terrorist organizations, though. As G.W. Schulz reports for the Center for Investigative Reporting:

One of the nation’s oldest fusion centers, known as the El Paso Intelligence Center, accidentally caused a California couple that owns a flight training school to be falsely held at gunpoint by police for the second time. Twice now EPIC has failed to clean up incorrect data that led authorities to believe a plane owned by the pair was stolen.

In Maryland, a fusion center and DHS ended up labeling a peace group as terrorists. Anti-abortion activists have also come under suspicion.

Despite these sorts of missteps, the number of fusion centers is only growing: there are currently 72 scattered across the country.

But the Coast Guard has always pursued multiple missions. And by its own performance measures — good enough that the GAO cited them in 2009 testimony on the agency’s budget — the Coast Guard has been meeting its goals for both homeland security and environmental safety, while it’s had a harder time living up to expectations for “migrant interdiction” and “defense readiness.”

The agency’s real problem, one which the Post’s story passes over glibly, is not that it has too many missions but that expected budget cuts could make it more difficult to fulfill them all. Indeed, the Post itself reported back in February on former Commandant Thad Allen’s worries about the cuts: “Our force is more fragile this year than last and we are accepting increased operational risk while recapitalizing aging cutters,” Allen said.

What’s more, the Post wades into a long-fought dispute over who in Congress should has oversight over the Coast Guard. The story depends on Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.) to argue the Coast Guard lacks the personnel to carry out its multiple mission, but again, the Post rushes over an important fact–that Oberstar favors moving the Coast Guard out of the Department of Homeland Security.

Since the creation of DHS, and more importantly, since the creation of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Oberstar’s Transportation and Infrastructure committee has had to share jurisdiction over the Coast Guard. If it’s true that the Coast Guard’s homeland security duties are taking away from its other missions, then, the logic goes, why not revert to a state of affairs closer to the pre-9/11 system? Move the Coast Guard out of DHS, have it focus on its traditional missions, and restore total oversight to Oberstar’s committee.