Homeland Security

I’ve always been struck by the metaphor of the frog in a pot of water, where over time as the heat increases, the frog gets used to it until eventually, he’s accepted his own poaching and death. Had the frog been thrown into a pot of boiling water, he would have jumped out and saved himself.
 
This is not dissimilar to what is happening in the debate over the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” and the use of torture by the CIA. Where 15 years ago, few would have supported the use of torture by the United States under any circumstances, today as we fudge the facts and play with the terms, as some of our national leaders including our former president, vice president, and CIA director endorse the use of torture, as the public dialogue treats the use of torture as a public policy debate as opposed to a criminal act, we are accepting torture as an anti-terrorism option and in so doing, poaching our most cherished values.

The national conversation taking place around immigration is at its core about how we define ourselves as Americans, and about our relationships with one another. A critical issue that often escapes the limelight is that of the broken family-based immigration system which keeps loved ones apart, often for decades.

As of November 2012, around 4.3 million people were waiting to obtain visas in order to join their family members who reside in the United States. A significant number – 1.8 million – are seeking to unite with immediate relatives who are Asian Americans. Family members from China, India and the Philippines, for example, have been waiting between 10 and 23 years to receive visas that will enable them to join their U.S. citizen or permanent resident relatives in America.

As experts on law and policy continue to debate the prospective shape of immigration reform, they should not lose sight of the two groups of people who will have to navigate whatever process emerges from these deliberations – the applicants themselves and the U.S. government employees who have to process them. Thinking about how those two groups behave, and what they would need to be successful under a new immigration regime, presents good arguments for leveraging both existing processes and new technology.

The political and economic forces at work both in China and Iran help explain their motives for conducting offensive [and effective] hacking raids on public and private assets in the U.S.

Iran, despite sitting atop the 4th largest proven oil and 2nd largest proven natural gas reserves in the world, has devolved into a pariah nation with a cash-starved population and flailing political economy. According to January’s CRS Report for Congress, that nation saw its crude exports – which supply 70 percent of Iran’s shrinking government revenues - halve from 2011 to 2012.

Mehdi Mahraoui dreams of getting his doctorate in social work because he wants to improve his community and he is passionate about social justice. Like many 22-year-olds, Mehdi has a lot of dreams. Unlike other young people his age, Mehdi may have to put his dreams on hold.

Mehdi was brought to the United States from Morocco at age seven. Until late last year, he was undocumented. His oldest sister and both of his parents, however, remain in deportation proceedings. If they are deported, Mehdi will be the sole care taker of his eight-year-old sister who is a U.S citizen. Read more...

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Or so that's what our founders once declared.

With that responsibility, the Federal government has a duty to protect its citizens, providing certain unalienable rights.

So, it's no surprise then that Republicans and Democrats alike joined with Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) Wednesday supporting his filibuster to protest John Brennan's CIA nomination and bring attention to Obama's overreach of the Federal government with the U.S. drone program (of which Brennan was one of the chief architects).

The most positive outcome of Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster — which ended when Paul was forced to take a bathroom break — was giving the American public a sense of the treacherous path that President Obama’s drone program could take, i.e. the targeted killing of Americans here at home. It was a marathon civics lesson and a scathing critique of President Obama’s civil liberties record.

Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.) recently compared the release by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of administrative detainees to Fidel Castro's 1980 "release of criminals" via the Port of Mariel to Key West and the United States.
 
The congressman's witty provocation suggests that he is ignorant of U.S. immigration and detention policy and of Cuba's human rights abuses.
 
Among the 125,000 Cubans who came here in 1980 as part of the Mariel boatlift, there were, of course, "real" criminals. But Barletta seems blissfully unaware that Fidel Castro put Cubans in jail for political reasons and on trumped-up charges. A common "crime" among the Mariel Cubans was peligrosidad or "dangerousness." This was a code-word to justify the incarceration of people for being potentially counter-revolutionary, or gay, or otherwise "undesireable." Sometimes the "dangerousness" label simply provided cover for a local policeman to exercise arbitrary authority.

Immigration is now the center of the political debate. Fortunately, the debate has become somewhat more reasonable as extreme Tea Party Republicans, like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), slip from positions of relevance. But now more than ever, we need leaders to fight fiercely for humane immigration reform on behalf of our Latino and immigrant communities reflecting the headways we’ve made politically. Sen. Chuck Schumer has had sensitive rhetoric on immigration at times when the immigration debate included the unrealistic extremes like SB 1070 and self-deportation. However, in reviewing Senator Schumer’s current immigration record, Latinos and immigrant communities should be alarmed.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reportedly put on supervised release several hundred immigrants who had been jailed across the country awaiting removal hearings. The decision reportedly came in anticipation of Friday’s seemingly inevitable sequestration, which will lead to belt-tightening across the federal government. Some of the response from Congress has been reactionary.
 
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said, “Spending cuts are no excuse for releasing thousands of criminals and illegal immigrants into our communities. The administration is either incompetent and unable to prioritize spending, or reckless. Neither is acceptable.”
 
Smith’s scare-mongering is irresponsible.