Tag Archives: homeland

Donald Trump is threatening to end federal relief to Puerto Rico — on Twitter, of course.

In a memo leaked last week, Department of Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert recommended White House staff pivot to a “theme of stabilizing” with regard to messaging around the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico.

President Trump, however, appears to have missed that particular update. On Thursday morning, he threatened to pull federal relief workers from the devastated island just three weeks after Maria made landfall.

Meanwhile, most of Puerto Rico is still without power, hospitals are running out of medical supplies, and clean water remains scarce.

Trump isn’t the only prominent Republican refusing to recognize the severity of the crisis. In an interview with CNN on Thursday morning, Representative Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican, accused host Chris Cuomo of fabricating reports of the severity of the disaster.

“Mr. Cuomo, you’re simply just making this stuff up,” Perry said. “If half the country didn’t have food or water, those people would be dying, and they’re not.”

45 Puerto Rican deaths have been officially confirmed so far, and reports from the ground indicate the unofficial number of deaths due to the storm is higher.

Source:

Donald Trump is threatening to end federal relief to Puerto Rico — on Twitter, of course.

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Trump Administration Leaves 50,000 Haitians in Legal Limbo

Mother Jones

About 50,000 Haitians living in the United States will remain in limbo for another six months. The Trump administration has reportedly granted a temporary extension of these Haitians’ legal status, leaving them at risk of being forced to leave the country—or remain illegally—at the start of next year.

Multiple reports on Monday indicate that the Department of Homeland Security will extend Temporary Protected Status for Haitian nationals for six months. Haitians were granted the special status in 2010, after an earthquake leveled buildings, displaced millions, and killed an estimated 300,000 people. As Mother Jones previously reported, TPS is granted to people from countries experiencing humanitarian crises:

First introduced in 1990, the TPS program provides humanitarian relief to nationals of countries coping with a severe conflict or natural disaster. By providing recipients with legal status and work authorization, TPS designations—typically granted in six- to 18-month cycles that can be renewed indefinitely—have become a crucial means of aiding people who face unsafe conditions should they be sent back to their home country.

The extension was first reported on Monday by the Washington Post and confirmed by the Miami Herald, which wrote that Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) received a call from DHS with news of the decision. DHS not not respond to Mother Jones‘ request for comment.

With the extension, Haiti’s TPS designation will continue past its current July expiration date, to January 22, 2018. The six-month extension aligns with the recommendation of James McCament, acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, who wrote a memo to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly in April suggesting that Haiti’s TPS designation be extended to the beginning of 2018 and then allowed to expire. Immigration advocates had strongly encouraged DHS to extend the designation for a full 18 months, arguing that Haiti needed more time to recover before thousands of people could return to the country safely.

Prior to the decision, some 50,000 Haitians living and working in the United States were at risk of being deported back to Haiti, which is dealing with a multitude of conflicts—or staying in the United States and becoming undocumented. The latest extension means that Haitians with TPS can breathe for now but will face the same suspense in November, when DHS must again decide whether to extend their TPS or allow it to expire.

Immigration advocates had mixed reactions to the news. “The fear was that we may not even get six months,” says Nana Brantuo, policy manager for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, one of the groups that has called for an extension of Haiti’s TPS designation. But she adds, “The 18-month extension is what we need. Otherwise we’re going to have thousands of people who are unauthorized in fear of being deported.”

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Trump Administration Leaves 50,000 Haitians in Legal Limbo

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David Clarke, America’s Most Terrifying Sheriff, Says He’s Joining the Trump Administration

Mother Jones

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David Clarke, the controversial sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, will “accept an appointment as an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security,” he reportedly told a local radio host Wednesday. Clarke said he will take a position at the Office of Partnership and Engagement. In that role, he would help coordinate DHS outreach to local law enforcement agencies, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

So far, DHS isn’t confirming Clarke’s appointment. “Such senior positions are announced by the Department when made official by the Secretary,” a department spokeswoman said in an email to Mother Jones. “No such announcement with regard to the Office of Public Engagement has been made.”

Clarke, who rose to national prominence last year as a vocal Trump supporter and a frequent guest on Fox News, has made headlines in recent months due to lawsuits filed against him alleging mistreatment of inmates in the jail he oversees. Last year, four people died in that jail. As we reported in March:

Clarke has faced two federal lawsuits since December, in the wake of four deaths that occurred last year in the Milwaukee County Jail. In mid-March, the family of a man who died of dehydration in April 2016 sued Clarke and the county, alleging that jail staff subjected the man to “torture” by denying him water as he pleaded for it over 10 days. County prosecutors are considering bringing felony charges against jail staff for neglect. Another lawsuit, filed last December, seeks damages for the death of a newborn in the jail last July, after jail staff ignored the infant’s mother as she went into labor and for more than six hours thereafter, according to the suit.

A grand jury recently recommended charges against several jail employees in the case of the man who died of thirst. A separate lawsuit alleges mistreatment of pregnant inmates at the jail:

In that suit, a woman alleges that, during a seven-month stint at the jail in 2013, she was forcibly shackled with a “belly-chain” that tied her wrists and legs to her stomach during her hospitalization for pre-natal care, while she was in labor, and while she received treatment for post-partum depression after she gave birth. The restraints made giving birth more painful for the woman, left marks on her body, and made it more difficult for doctors—who insisted she be freed—to give her an epidural, the lawsuit says. The jail has a policy that inmates be shackled while receiving medical care that makes no exceptions for pregnancy, according to the lawsuit, which also states that more than 40 women were subjected to the same treatment.

Clarke has apparently been angling for a job with the Trump administration for months. Last year, he spent so many days away from his office while stumping for Trump that local officials have called for his resignation:

Clarke visited 20 states in 2016, according to financial disclosure documents he filed with the county, often to give paid speeches in which he praised Donald Trump. He spent about 60 days out of state last year, the documents show. (Before he campaigned for Trump, Clarke took a trip to Moscow in December 2015 with a delegation from the NRA, during which they met with Russian officials.)

In January, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published an editorial calling for the sheriff to step down, citing the jail deaths, his habit of attacking his political opponents on social media—which he does on his department’s official Facebook page—and the fact that Clarke seemed more focused on “pining for a job in the Trump administration” than on his responsibilities as county sheriff. County auditors have launched an investigation into whether Clarke abused his power following an airplane flight in January when he had six deputies and two K-9 units confront a passenger at the gate with whom Clarke had an unfriendly exchange on the plane.

Clarke has also faced pushback from local activists and officials critical of his plan to enroll his sheriff’s department in a controversial immigration enforcement partnership with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the Department of Homeland Security. In his role at DHS, Clarke would presumably be recruiting other agencies to participate in the program.

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David Clarke, America’s Most Terrifying Sheriff, Says He’s Joining the Trump Administration

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Trump Administration Launches Office Focused on Crimes by Immigrants

Mother Jones

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The Trump administration officially launched an office on Wednesday dedicated to the victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants—an effort that immigrant advocates say does not align with actual crime data and appears designed to demonize immigrants.

The Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) office, which will provide aid to people affected by crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. According to DHS and officials with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement—which will house the office—this assistance will include a hotline to answer questions about the immigration enforcement process and a notification system to provide updates to registered victims about the custody status of immigrant perpetrators.

The services provide by VOICE are not new: Most are already offered by ICE’s community engagement office, and the office draws upon personnel and resources that the agency already has. But administration officials have shifted the tone of the conversation by focusing on victims of crimes committed by immigrants.

“All crime is terrible, but these victims are unique—and too often ignored,” Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said during the Wednesday launch event in Washington. “They are casualties of crimes that should never have taken place, because the people who victimized them oftentimes should not have been in the country in the first place.”

In reports and statements leading up to the launch, VOICE has been described as focusing exclusively on people affected by crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. But DHS officials on Wednesday said that the office would provide services to victims of “crimes with an immigration nexus,” suggesting that the scope of the agency could expand beyond the undocumented. DHS officials told reporters that VOICE will focus on crimes committed by anyone who could potentially face deportation, a grouping that could include immigrants with legal status.

The office has been in the works for several months and was developed with input from victims and their families, many of whom attended the launch event. It was first mentioned in the president’s January executive order addressing illegal immigration, and its purpose was further clarified in a memo published by Kelly in February. President Donald Trump first spoke publicly about it in his February address to Congress, when he said, “We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media and silenced by special interests.”

The launch drew immediate criticism from immigration advocates. “The goal of this program is to instill fear of non-white immigrants,” the National Day Laborer Organizing Network said in a statement. “It is another deliberate step taken by the Trump administration towards creating institutions that legitimize racist propaganda. That’s what this is about, instilling fear in order to subject people to double suspicion, double punishment, and deprivation of due process.” Others have argued that while the administration focuses on crimes committed by immigrants, it has pulled back from assisting immigrant crime victims, leaving many immigrants fearful of reporting crimes to police.

“I think it is absurd to highlight the crimes committed by a small group of people without reporting on the crimes committed by everybody,” Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said in an interview before the Wednesday launch. With the establishment of VOICE, he added, the administration appears to be “trying to show how dangerous a group of people is when they have no statistical evidence towards that claim.” Crime data suggests that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens.

At Wednesday’s event, DHS officials argued that VOICE is not about demonizing immigrants, but instead will focus on assisting victims and families who are confused about how immigration enforcement works. “The immigration system is so complicated, there wasn’t anyone there to tell victims what has been happening on the immigration side,” said DHS spokesman David Lapan. “This office can help victims’ families understand the immigration elements of the crimes committed.”

But that mission has been complicated by the president’s rhetoric on immigration and the undocumented. Trump has frequently highlighted the immigration records of violent offenders. One of his central campaign promises was to build a wall between Mexico and the United States, and he has pledged to ramp up deportations.

Launching just days before Trump’s 100th day in office, VOICE comes at a difficult moment for the administration. On Tuesday, a federal judge blocked part of the president’s order that would have withheld funding from so-called sanctuary cities, which refuse to comply with Trump’s call to detain and deport undocumented immigrants.

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Trump Administration Launches Office Focused on Crimes by Immigrants

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Leaked DHS Doc Says Trump’s Seven Countries Aren’t Very Dangerous

Mother Jones

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Remember those seven countries that President Trump singled out for a travel ban? He asked the Department of Homeland Security to check them out and explain why they deserved to be on a no-entry list. Here’s what he got:

Oops. “Rarely implicated” means a grand total of six people out of 82. That’s one per year since 2011. And not one terrorist plot per year, either. One “terrorism related offense” per year. In many of these cases, it’s probably a material support charge for sending a hundred bucks to some warlord back home.

This comes via the AP, which got this comment:

Homeland Security spokeswoman Gillian Christensen on Friday did not dispute the report’s authenticity, but said it was not a final comprehensive review of the government’s intelligence.

“While DHS was asked to draft a comprehensive report on this issue, the document you’re referencing was commentary from a single intelligence source versus an official, robust document with thorough interagency sourcing,” Christensen said. “The … report does not include data from other intelligence community sources. It is incomplete.”

I have a feeling that once the “interagency sourcing” is finished, there might be a different spin on these numbers. This is very definitely not what the boss wants to hear.

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Leaked DHS Doc Says Trump’s Seven Countries Aren’t Very Dangerous

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Donald Trump Is Puzzled About All This Russia Hacking Stuff

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has a question:

Hmmm. That’s a chin scratcher for sure. Why didn’t anyone bring this up before the election? Like, say, in the first debate:

Or the second debate:

Or the third debate:

Or from 17 agencies of the US intelligence community:

Or from the mainstream media, like, say, the New York Times:

U.S. Says Russia Directed Hacks to Influence Elections

The Obama administration on Friday formally accused the Russian government of stealing and disclosing emails from the Democratic National Committee and a range of other institutions and prominent individuals….In a statement from the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., and the Department of Homeland Security, the government said the leaked emails that have appeared on a variety of websites “are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.”

Yep. It’s a real chin scratcher. How is it that no one brought this up before the election?

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Donald Trump Is Puzzled About All This Russia Hacking Stuff

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California Will Keep Housing Its Detained Immigrants in For-Profit Centers

Mother Jones

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Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a bill on Wednesday that would have prevented local governments from contracting with for-profit companies to detain immigrants. Seventy percent of the state’s immigrant detainees are held in for-profit facilities, according to data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In his veto message, Brown said that he was “troubled” by recent reports revealing poor conditions in some private detention facilities. But he explained his veto by deferring to the Department of Homeland Security, which manages ICE and is currently examining its use of for-profit companies.

DHS’s choice to review its use of private detention centers came less than two weeks after the Department of Justice announced that it was ending its use of private prisons. A report from DHS’s advisory council is expected back by November 30. “These actions indicate that a more permanent solution to this issue may be at hand,” Brown wrote. “I urge the federal authorities to act swiftly.”

But last Thursday, in a statement interpreted as a bad sign for those pushing to eliminate these for-profit centers, ICE director Sarah Saldaña told the House Judiciary Committee that eliminating private detention centers would “pretty much turn our system upside down.” Around 73 percent of the immigration detainees are held in facilities currently operated by for-profit companies. If the for-profit companies were no longer housing detainees, ICE would have to build more detention centers and hire staff in order to meet its ongoing legal requirement to maintain at least 34,000 immigration detention beds.

The California bill, which passed 25-13 in the state Senate and 51-28 in the House last month, would have eventually closed three of California’s four private immigration detention centers. It also would have required all of California’s immigration detention facilities, public and private, to meet the most recent federal standards for things like medical care, and would have extended extra protections to LGBT inmates, prohibiting them from being forced into segregated housing on the basis of their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Closing the three private detention centers would have affected approximately 40,000 immigrants held there every year, according to Christina Fialho, executive director at Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC), a nonprofit that helped draft the California bill. With the three facilities closed, ICE would have been forced to send detainees elsewhere—either to publicly run local jails, out-of-state detention centers, other private facilities, or possibly community-based monitoring systems.

Among the facilities that the bill would have closed is Adelanto, a 1,960-bed center run by the for-profit corrections company GEO Group and the subject of a 2015 report from CIVIC. The report pointed to allegations of inhumane conditions and poor access to legal representation. At least one immigrant has died at Adelanto due to “egregious errors” by the center’s medical staff, who did not give him proper medical examinations or help him access timely off-site treatment, according to a letter signed by 29 members of Congress who sought an ICE investigation into health and safety concerns at the facility last summer.

Last November, a group of at least 400 detainees at Adelanto launched a hunger strike to protest what they saw as inhumane conditions. They asked for longer visiting hours with their families, better medical and dental care, cleaner and better-prepared food, daily access to an outdoor yard, and an ICE employee to handle their grievances rather than a GEO staff member. “We are detainees and not prisoners,” they wrote in a letter obtained by Think Progress. GEO Group typically makes $111.92 a day in revenue for each immigrant it incarcerates in Adelanto, according to ICE.

Here’s our coverage of the latest developments:

August 29, 2016: The Department of Homeland Security announces that it will be reexamining its use of private prison companies to hold immigration detainees.
August 18, 2016: The Justice Department declares that it will stop contracting with private prisons, which incarcerate 12 percent of federal inmates.
August 12, 2016: A blockbuster report from the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General finds that private prisons are less safe and less secure than their publicly run counterparts, and that the Bureau of Prisons does not adequately supervise their operation.
June 23, 2016: Mother Jones publishes reporter Shane Bauer’s account of four months working at a private prison in Louisiana.

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California Will Keep Housing Its Detained Immigrants in For-Profit Centers

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Baton Rouge Cop Killer Was a "Sovereign Citizen." What the Heck Is That?

Mother Jones

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On July 17, in the second (at least) targeted attack on police in just over a week, 29-year-old Gavin Long shot six cops, three fatally, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The former Marine had posted YouTube selfie videos in which he commented on the need to respond to “oppression” with “bloodshed,” and praised the recent shooting of 11 officers in Dallas as “justice.” Long also appears to have been part of the so-called “sovereign citizen” movement. Last May, he filed official documents in Jackson County, Missouri, declaring a name change and identifying himself as a member of the Empire Washita de Dugdahmoundyah—a black group that espouses some of the movement’s ideas. According to the Daily Beast, Long was also carrying an ID card from the Empire at the time of the shooting. Here’s what you need to know about sovereign citizenship, and the branch Long subscribed to.

Sovereign citizen ideology is modeled on Posse Comitatus. A government-hating, right-wing Christian group, Posse Comitatus was founded around 1970 in Oregon. Its members claimed that white Americans, not Jews—whom members accused of manipulating government and financial institutions—were the true descendants of the Biblical tribe of Israel. Posse members rejected the authority of government officials, judges, and police officers. They claimed that because blacks were granted citizenship under the 14th Amendment (an act of government) they were bound by the government’s laws and were slaves to the state. But white citizenship predates the Constitution, the Posse claimed, so whites were bound only by “common” law, which made them “sovereign” and free—and not, for example, compelled to pay taxes.

Ryan Lenz of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks anti-government groups, says Posse members traveled around during the 1970s and 1980s teaching financially stressed whites—chiefly farmers who were losing their land during the agricultural crisis of those decades, or people facing foreclosure and debt—that the group’s ideology could help them out of their money binds. The Posse’s solution? Declare sovereignty and separate one’s legal “shell”—the named entity tied to social security numbers, birth certificates, and other forms of government identification—from one’s actual personhood. A person who did this, the Posse said, would no longer need to abide by rules of the state. Sovereign citizens played a major role in the formation, during the 1990s, of so-called “patriot” militia groups. (There was a resurgence of such groups after President Barack Obama was elected.)

Sovereign citizens are notorious for “paper terrorism”: Members of the movement often travel without drivers licenses, passports, or other state-issued ID. They are known to drive with fake license plates and often present police officers with travel cards and bogus insurance paperwork when they get pulled over. Faced with a traffic ticket, or when involved in other dealings with government agencies, sovereign citizens are notorious for flooding the agencies with hundreds of pages of documents—written in somewhat nonsensical “common law” language—arguing for the rights to which they claim entitlement. In one 2010 case, a sovereign submitted 10 such filings in a bid to get out of a $20 dog licensing fee. It worked. A state prosecutor dropped the case after two months of back and forth. Sovereign citizens have also been known to squat on vacant property and lay claim to it using phony deeds, and file bogus property liens against adversaries. Some have convened citizen tribunals, declaring government officials guilty of corruption, and acquitting themselves of any charges against them by the state.

The movement is growing, and spreading to new demographics. Based on IRS data on tax protesters, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that the sovereign movement has about 300,000 members. The SPLC has seen an uptick in participation since 2010, Lenz says, largely due to the housing crisis. Naturally, the ideology spreads quickly online, in chat rooms and YouTube comment sections. Newer recruits may be unaware of the movement’s racist roots; ideas espoused by Black sovereign citizen groups, Lenz says, “seem to affirm black personhood in the presence of a dominant white narrative.” And the anti-government sentiment often takes the form of leftist pan-Africanism and black separatism.

One strain of the ideology popular among black Americans is rooted in the Moorish Science Temple of America: It holds that blacks predated Native Americans in North America, and thus have indigenous rights. (Wesley Snipes, convicted of tax evasion in 2008, had ties to one of the first known black sovereign groups, the Nuwabians.) According to J. J. MacNab, an expert on sovereign citizens at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University, sovereign ideology is most common among blacks in East Coast cities such as Philadelphia and DC, and in the South—particularly Florida, Tennessee, and the New Orleans area. After the 2014 Ferguson protests, the St. Louis area also became a hotbed for black sovereign citizenship. “You’re going to find chiropractors and dentists and doctors and all kinds of wealthy professionals in this movement as well—not just poor,” MacNab says.

Gavin Long hailed from Kansas City, Missouri. In Long’s county filings, MacNab told me, he declared that he was shedding the name associated with his legal shell—he’s “Cosmo Setepenra” in the YouTube videos—and that he was only subject to indigenous common law. Sovereign citizenry may have begun as a right-wing movement, she says, but “by the time you’re in the fringe, left-wing, right-wing doesn’t really matter anymore.”

Members of Long’s “Moorish” offshoot, the Empire Wishitaw de Dugdahmoundyah, insist that much of the land acquired by the United States in the Louisiana purchase belongs to their ancestors. (Fredrix Washington, an Empire leader, told me he does not consider it a sovereign citizen group, that the Empire no longer producers false identification documents, and that he denounced Long’s killing of police officers. The group sells bogus license plates on its website, however, and some of its members were investigated by the federal government in the late 1990s for money laundering, offshore banking fraud, and selling illegal license plates, which they said were justified under common law.)

Members of other black groups, such as the African American Homeland Association and the New Black Panther Party (not to be confused with the Black Panther Party for Self Defense) also express sovereign ideas, MacNab says, but so-called Moorish sovereigns probably represent just 5 to 10 percent of the overall movement. Many black Americans subscribe to “patriot” sovereign ideology, which has been around longer and is largely championed by whites. There are “hundreds of strains of thought as to what sovereign citizenry is,” Lenz notes.

Police see sovereign citizens as their biggest threat: While the movement’s chief tactic is legal warfare, sovereign groups have been prone to physical violence against police, judges, and government officials. In a 2015 survey of nearly 400 law enforcement agencies by the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement research group, 74 percent said they considered sovereign citizens to be the top threat facing law enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security also considers sovereigns a domestic terror threat.

From 2010 through 2014, there were at least 24 violent incidents involving sovereign citizens, according to CNN. In 2010, a father-son sovereign duo in West Memphis, Arkansas killed two police officers with an AK-47 during a traffic stop. In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson protests, two men were accused of plotting to kill the Ferguson’s police chief and top prosecutor, and blow up a police station. The men, who ultimately pleaded guilty to weapons charges, had ties to the New Black Panther Party. One, like Gavin Long, identified himself as a Moorish national, according to the Star Tribune. Only “a tiny little group of people” within the larger movement have been linked to violence, MacNab notes. But younger sovereigns may be more amenable to it: “The older generation will do a decade of paperwork before they give up” and lash out.

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Baton Rouge Cop Killer Was a "Sovereign Citizen." What the Heck Is That?

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Here’s Why the Airport Security Line is a Nightmare

Mother Jones

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On an uncharacteristically chilly Saturday earlier this month, travelers found themselves standing in line for more than two hours to get through security Chicago’s O’Hare airport. A staggering 450 American Airlines travelers missed their flights. Dozens spent the night in the airport, and the incident brought national attention to increasingly long wait times.

Last Wednesday, called to Congress to account for the longer security lines, Transportation Security Administration Administrator Peter V. Neffenger told the House Homeland Security Committee that record travel, understaffed checkpoints, and some policy changes aiming to reduce risk of terrorist attacks means that the problem will continue into the summer. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) told the committee that TSA is in a “crisis.”

So what is going on with TSA? Well, a lot.

For starters: Perhaps you’ve heard that TSA is short staffed in part due to security coverage at presidential campaign events. Actually, TSA has been staffing presidential campaigns since 2004. The agency insists that the additional work does not impact the staffing at airports, because the officers working these events would have been off-duty otherwise. And it doesn’t effect the TSA budget, because the United States Secret Service pays for the screeners’ time at campaign events. (The airport nearest to a campaign event provides this support.)

The staffing provided for Donald Trump’s events, though, have far exceeded that of any other candidate. As of March, 770 TSA officers had been provided to Trump events, 544 went to Sanders events, and 207 worked Clinton events. When asked how the agency determines the appropriate number of officials needed for any event, a TSA spokesman said, “We provide the number we feel is appropriate.”

So what about the agencies budget woes?

According to a TSA spokesman, money plays a big factor in the TSA’s struggle to shorten wait times and increase efficiency. From fiscal year 2012 to 2013, the agency’s budget fell from $7.8 billion to $7.2 billion.

But, from 2013 to late 2014, now-former TSA head of security Kelly Hoggan received under-the-radar bonuses that came to more than $90,000. This week, Hoggan was relieved of his duties in part, the agency said, because of these bonuses.

In an interview with The Washington Post, TSA Administrator Peter V. Neffenger called the bonuses that supplemented Hoggan’s $181,500 salary “completely unjustifiable.” (Hoggan also recently faced accusations of retribution toward employees who spoke out about mismanagement.)

Additionally, a TSA spokesman says the agency’s staffing budget has declined annually from 2012 to 2015, and the agency is at its lowest staffing level in five years.

TSA attributes the long wait lines partly to budget cuts and tightened security procedures that have led to a shortage of screeners. Jeh Johnson, Department of Homeland Security secretary, told NPR that despite the challenges, Congress recently held off on cutting another 1,600 positions, and TSA is expediting the addition of 800 new positions. They’re expected to be in place next month. Johnson said TSA is converting more part-time workers to full time and bringing in more drug-sniffing dogs.

Johnson also added that carry-on luggage is a major contributor to wait times, and he encouraged passengers to check their bags—and to arrive at the airport with plenty of time to spare.

Democratic Senators Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut wrote a letter to a dozen major airlines calling on them to aid in reducing wait times by waiving checked baggage fees.

“Without charges for checking their bags, passengers will be far less likely to carry them on, which snarls screening checkpoints and slows the inspection process,” they wrote.

Markey and Blumenthal echoed Johnson’s call for more passengers to sign up for TSA’s pre-check program, which has an average wait time of five minutes or less.

Despite the pressure to reduce wait times, Johnson insisted that TSA will not “shortcut passengers’ safety.” (His caution is understandable, given that in April, TSA agents discovered a record number of guns and other weapons in passengers’ carry-on luggage.)

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Here’s Why the Airport Security Line is a Nightmare

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Video: What We Saw Before Being Kicked Out of the SWAT Convention

Mother Jones

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This weekend, my colleague Prashanth Kamalakanthan and I attended Urban Shield, a first-responder convention sponsored by over 100 corporations and the Department of Homeland Security. The five-day confab included a trade show where vendors display everything from armored trucks to sniper rifles to 3D printable drones. (We documented a few of the more remarkable offerings here.) It also involved the largest SWAT training exercise in the world. Some 35 SWAT teams competed in a 48-hour exercise involving 31 scenarios that included ambushing vehicles, indoor shootouts, maritime interdiction, train assaults and a mock eviction of a right-wing Sovereign Citizens group. The teams came from cities across the San Francisco Bay area, Singapore, and South Korea and included a University of California SWAT team, a team of US Marines, and a SWAT team of prison guards.

But on Sunday, at a competition site near the Bay Bridge, our coverage was cut short. A police officer confiscated our press badges, politely explaining that his captain had called and given him the order. The captain, he said, told him we had been filming in an unauthorized location, though he could not tell us where that location was. (We’d been advised earlier that it was okay to film so long as we did not go on the bridge itself.) After several phone calls from both me and my editors, no one could tell us exactly what we had done wrong, but Sgt. J.D. Nelson, the public information officer for the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department (which hosts the Department of Homeland Security-funded event) made it clear that we could not have our passes back.

We’ll have a more in-depth report, and a lot more images and videos, in a few days.

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Video: What We Saw Before Being Kicked Out of the SWAT Convention

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Video: What We Saw Before Being Kicked Out of the SWAT Convention