Russia is Getting Away with it All

Posted on May 9, 2016May 9, 2016 by Denise Simon

Russia Establishes New Military Base in Palmyra: Activists

Local activists claim Moscow has founded a second base in the desert city after taking over the Hmeimim military base in Lattakia last year

The Palmyra Coordination Committee released a statement on Sunday stating that Russia has established a second military base in Syria located in the area of Palmyra, Idleb province.

The statement added that the Islamic State group and Syrian regime forces facilitated handing the ancient city over to the Russians.

“Locals were forcibly displaced by regime and Russians bombings as well as [ISIS] while Assad today with international sponsorship gives Russians the right to violate the property of the people of Palmyra in reward [for] their efforts [by] occupying the city and violating locals’ property.”

The Committee also released footage with the statement showing a Russian military base surrounded by barbed wire.

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UN accuses Syrian government of blocking aid to Aleppo

The UN has accused the Syrian government of refusing UN appeals to deliver aid to 905,000 people, including in war-torn Aleppo, as the city suffered another day of attacks despite efforts to secure a ceasefire. “We seem to be having new possible besieged areas on our watch, we are having hundreds of relief workers unable to move in Aleppo,” UN humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland said after a weekly humanitarian meeting of nations backing the Syria peace process.”It is a disgrace to see while the population of Aleppo is bleeding their options to flee have never been more difficult than now.”

Russia has said a new ceasefire to halt fighting in Aleppo could be imminent, with Syria’s divided northern city hit by a wave of violence that has killed more than 270 people since 22 April.

Reports on Wednesday said at least three people had died in new attacks in the city, as rebel forces pressed an offensive against government troops on the city’s western outskirts.

With the UN Security Council to hold urgent talks on the crisis later on Wednesday, diplomatic efforts to stem the violence shifted to Germany where Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was to meet UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura, Syria’s main opposition leader Riad Hijab and France’s top diplomat Jean-Marc Ayrault.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said late on Tuesday he hoped to agree on a freeze of fighting in Aleppo “in the near future, maybe even in the next few hours”, after meeting de Mistura in Moscow. Full story here.

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Close Encounters With Jets Show Russia’s Anger at NATO Buildup, U.S.

NYT’s/ WASHINGTON — When the Pentagon complained about a Russian fighter plane performing a barrel roll near an Air Force reconnaissance plane in international airspace over the Baltic Sea on April 29, a quick response came from Moscow, which claimed that the American plane did not have its transponder turned on.

“The U.S. Air Force has two solutions,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a sharp statement. “Either not to fly near our borders or to turn the transponder on for identification.” (American officials said the transponder had, indeed, been turned on.)

With that, American officials and foreign policy experts said, Russia delivered its response to President Obama’s decision this year to substantially increase the deployment of heavy weapons, armored vehicles and other equipment to NATO countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The move is meant to deter Russia from further aggression in the region.

By sharply ramping up so-called intercepts of American ships and planes in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia is demonstrating its anger over the increased American military presence in a region it considers part of its backyard, White House officials said. They called the Russian actions harassment.

Obama administration officials said they interpreted Russia’s statement as a demand that the United States stay out of the Baltics — and that is not going to happen, these officials said.

“We’re going to continue to fly, and we’re going to continue to operate in the Baltic Sea,” Mr. Carpenter said. “This is not going to change our activities one iota.”

But the game of chance underway in the skies and on the seas of Central and Eastern Europe could lead to miscalculations, American officials warn. More from the NYT’s here.

Facebook Suppression of Conservatives Revealed

Posted on May 9, 2016May 9, 2016 by Denise Simon

Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

Gizmodo: Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

Related reading: I Asked a Privacy Lawyer What Facebook’s New Terms and Conditions Will Mean for You

These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed details about the inner workings of Facebook’s trending news team—a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the “trending” module on the upper-right-hand corner of the site. As we reported last week, curators have access to a ranked list of trending topics surfaced by Facebook’s algorithm, which prioritizes the stories that should be shown to Facebook users in the trending section. The curators write headlines and summaries of each topic, and include links to news sites. The section, which launched in 2014, constitutes some of the most powerful real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook’s users—167 million in the US alone—are reading at any given moment.

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.

Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”

Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.

Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed. The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work.

Managers on the trending news team did, however, explicitly instruct curators to artificially manipulate the trending module in a different way: When users weren’t reading stories that management viewed as important, several former workers said, curators were told to put them in the trending news feed anyway. Several former curators described using something called an “injection tool” to push topics into the trending module that weren’t organically being shared or discussed enough to warrant inclusion—putting the headlines in front of thousands of readers rather than allowing stories to surface on their own. In some cases, after a topic was injected, it actually became the number one trending news topic on Facebook.

“We were told that if we saw something, a news story that was on the front page of these ten sites, like CNN, the New York Times, and BBC, then we could inject the topic,” said one former curator. “If it looked like it had enough news sites covering the story, we could inject it—even if it wasn’t naturally trending.” Sometimes, breaking news would be injected because it wasn’t attaining critical mass on Facebook quickly enough to be deemed “trending” by the algorithm. Former curators cited the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris as two instances in which non-trending stories were forced into the module. Facebook has struggled to compete with Twitter when it comes to delivering real-time news to users; the injection tool may have been designed to artificially correct for that deficiency in the network. “We would get yelled at if it was all over Twitter and not on Facebook,” one former curator said.

In other instances, curators would inject a story—even if it wasn’t being widely discussed on Facebook—because it was deemed important for making the network look like a place where people talked about hard news. “People stopped caring about Syria,” one former curator said. “[And] if it wasn’t trending on Facebook, it would make Facebook look bad.” That same curator said the Black Lives Matter movement was also injected into Facebook’s trending news module. “Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the individual said. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics. When we injected it, everyone started saying, ‘Yeah, now I’m seeing it as number one’.” This particular injection is especially noteworthy because the #BlackLivesMatter movement originated on Facebook, and the ensuing media coverage of the movement often noted its powerful social media presence.

(In February, CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed his support for the movement in an internal memo chastising Facebook employees for defacing Black Lives Matter slogans on the company’s internal “signature wall.”)

When stories about Facebook itself would trend organically on the network, news curators used less discretion—they were told not to include these stories at all. “When it was a story about the company, we were told not to touch it,” said one former curator. “It had to be cleared through several channels, even if it was being shared quite a bit. We were told that we should not be putting it on the trending tool.”

(The curators interviewed for this story worked for Facebook across a timespan ranging from mid-2014 to December 2015.)

“We were always cautious about covering Facebook,” said another former curator. “We would always wait to get second level approval before trending something to Facebook. Usually we had the authority to trend anything on our own [but] if it was something involving Facebook, the copy editor would call their manager, and that manager might even call their manager before approving a topic involving Facebook.”

Gizmodo reached out to Facebook for comment about each of these specific claims via email and phone, but did not receive a response.

Several former curators said that as the trending news algorithm improved, there were fewer instances of stories being injected. They also said that the trending news process was constantly being changed, so there’s no way to know exactly how the module is run now. But the revelations undermine any presumption of Facebook as a neutral pipeline for news, or the trending news module as an algorithmically-driven list of what people are actually talking about.

Rather, Facebook’s efforts to play the news game reveal the company to be much like the news outlets it is rapidly driving toward irrelevancy: a select group of professionals with vaguely center-left sensibilities. It just happens to be one that poses as a neutral reflection of the vox populi, has the power to influence what billions of users see, and openly discusses whether it should use that power to influence presidential elections.

“It wasn’t trending news at all,” said the former curator who logged conservative news omissions. “It was an opinion.”

[Disclosure: Facebook has launched a program that pays publishers, including the New York Times and Buzzfeed, to produce videos for its Facebook Live tool. Gawker Media, Gizmodo’s parent company, recently joined that program.]

Drudge and Breitbart Wont Tell You this on Trump

Posted on May 6, 2016May 6, 2016 by Denise Simon

Mnuchin’s had a hand in the Southern California regional bank that was drowning in bad mortgages after the financial crisis of 2008. Mnuchin and a group of investors, including John Paulson and George Soros, bought the bank for $1.55 billion and turned it around changing the name in the process. OneWest now has assets of $25 billion and $14 billion in deposits.

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Trump’s new finance chair Steven Mnuchin was sued over Madoff fraud profit

Donald Trump’s new national finance chairman was sued in 2010 for the return of $US3.2 million ($4.3 million) in fake profit from his mother’s account with Bernard Madoff, the mastermind of a $US17.5 billion Ponzi scheme. More here.

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Trump Finance Chair Ran a Bank That Cashed in on Taxpayer Bailouts

FreeBeacon: Donald Trump’s newly-appointed national finance chairman, Steven Mnuchin, ran a bank that made billions of dollars off of taxpayer bailouts and cost the federal government an estimated $13 billion.

Mnuchin, a hedge-fund manager, worked as a partner for Goldman Sachs before assembling a group of billionaires to take over IndyMac Bank, based in California, after its subprime mortgage business collapsed in 2008.

Mother Jones reported:

Mnuchin’s group paid roughly $1.55 billion and received a promise from the [Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation] FDIC to cover a portion of the losses on bad loans within the IndyMac pool. The FDIC’s losses on these assets have since ballooned to an estimated $13 billion. The FDIC took on most of the risk, but Mnuchin and his partners, who named their new bank OneWest, ended up doing spectacularly well. They parlayed their $1.55 billion investment into a $3.4 billion payday last year, when Mnuchin engineered the sale of OneWest to another California bank, CIT. Along the way, OneWest issued more than $2 billion worth of dividends to shareholders. The tremendous profits the bank made, with taxpayers on the hook for IndyMac’s bad bets, raised eyebrows across the industry.

Furthermore, OneWest has been accused of risky and predatory loan practices, which prompted California community groups and a legal aid agency to ask Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen to halt the sale of OneWest to CIT last year before the bank paid reparations.

Trump’s criticism of big banks, Wall Street, and hedge-fund managers appears to conflict with his appointment of Mnuchin to a top post in his campaign.

Last year, Trump characterized hedge fund managers as “paper pushers” who are “getting away with murder” by not paying their fair share of taxes under the current tax code.

“The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky,” Trump said during a phone interview televised on CBS News. “They are energetic. They are very smart. But a lot of them–they are paper-pushers. They make a fortune. They pay no tax. It’s ridiculous, OK?”

Mnuchin’s contributions to Democrats further complicate his position on the presumptive GOP nominee’s campaign. Mnuchin has contributed thousands to committees supporting Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other Democratic politicians, the Washington Free Beacon reported Thursday.

“Steven is a professional at the highest level with an extensive and very successful financial background,” Trump said in a statement announcing Mnuchin as his finance chair. “He brings unprecedented experience and expertise to a fundraising operation that will benefit the Republican Party and ultimately defeat Hillary Clinton.”

**** Deeper dive from Heavy.com

Steven Mnuchin: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

A Wall Street banker and Hollywood movie producer, who has contributed to the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and other Democrats in the past, has been named as Donald Trump’s national finance chairman.

Steven Mnuchin, 53, was added to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s team on Thursday, Trump’s campaign announced in a press release.

“It’s a great privilege to be working with Mr. Trump to create a world class finance organization to support the campaign in the general election,” Mnuchin said in a statement.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. He Contributed to Hillary Clinton’s Senate Campaigns & 2008 Democratic Presidential Campaign but Has Also Supported Republicans

Steven Mnuchin has contributed more than $120,000 to both Democrats and Republicans over the past two decades, Politico reports. About $64,000 of those contributions went to Democratic candidates and $40,000 to Republicans, according to Politico.

He gave $7,000 to Clinton’s 200 and 2006 Senate bids, and also contributed to her 2008 Democratic presidential campaign. He contributed $2,300 to President Barack Obama’s 2007 presidential campaign.

In 2011 he contributed $2,500 on two occasions to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and gave $20,000 to the Republican National Committee in 2012. He has also contributed to John Edwards, Chuck Schumer, Rudy Giuliani, Al Gore and John Kerry, Politico reports.

Mnuchin’s political past does not differ much from that of his new boss.

Trump has also contributed to Clinton’s campaigns in the past. The presumptive GOP presidential nominee has said it was important for his business interests to support political candidates on both sides.

2. He Began His Career at Goldman Sachs Before Working for the George Soros-Funded OneWest Bank Group LLC

Mnuchin, a Yale University graduate, began his career at Goldman Sachs, rising to become a partner, according to the press release from Trump’s campaign.

After working at Goldman Sachs for 17 years, Mnuchin became the chairman and CEO of OneWest Bank Group LLC, a bank holding company, from 2009 to 2015. According to Politico, OneWest Bank Group was funded partly by George Soros, a major Democratic donor who has given millions to Hillary Clintons super PAC.

He is currently the chairman and CEO of Dune Capital Management LP, a private investment firm.

3. Trump Says Mnuchin Brings ‘Unprecedented Experience & Expertise’ to the Campaign

Trump praised Mnuchin in a statement announcing his new role with the campaign.

“Steven is a professional at the highest level with an extensive and very successful financial background. He brings unprecedented experience and expertise to a fundraising operation that will benefit the Republican Party and ultimately defeat Hillary Clinton,” Trump said.

The campaign said, “Mr. Trump is the presumptive Republican Nomination for President of the United States and is taking steps to gear up for a General Election against Democratic Nominee Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump has self-funded his successful primary battle and will likewise be putting up substantial money toward the general election.”

4. He Was an Executive Producer for ‘American Sniper,’ ‘The Lego Movie,’ & ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’

In addition to his extensive ties to Wall Street, Mnuchin is also connected to Hollywood.

Mnuchin has been an executive producer on several films since 2014, including “American Sniper,” “The Lego Movie,” “Mad Max:Fury Road,” “Black Mass,” “The Intern” and “Entourage,” according to his IMDB.com page.

5. He Is Divorced & Has 3 Children

Steven Mnuchin and his wife, Heather Crosby, divorced in 2014.

They have three children together. The couple married in 1999, according to their New York Times wedding announcement.

There Goes Afghanistan

Posted on May 6, 2016May 6, 2016 by Denise Simon

While we have been at war, or maybe not so much lately in Afghanistan, the forgotten war, the Taliban and al Qaeda have partnered once again in earnest. Further, al Qaeda is successfully competing for fighters, those leaving Islamic State. The reemergence of al Qaeda will likely go well in collaboration with the Taliban due in part to the Taliban’s increased revenue sources.

There are about 10,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan; about 8,500 of them are soldiers.

Current plans call for that number to drop to about 5,000 in 2016, but the top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Campbell, testified on Capitol Hill earlier this month that he wants “greater flexibility” to potentially keep more troops in-country. More from ArmyTimes.

Taliban Gets ‘Windfall’ from Poppy Harvest to Fund Offensives

The Taliban will reap “windfall” profits from a bumper poppy harvest in Afghanistan this spring to fund coming offensives, a U.S. military spokesman in Kabul said Thursday.

“The poppy crop is really the engine that provides all the money that fuels the Taliban,” and the insurgents were expected to benefit from “this very good poppy crop that they had this year,” said Army Brig. Gen. Charles H. Cleveland.

“As a result, we do expect an uptick in Taliban efforts to attack” when the harvest is completed later this month, with offensives focused on southwestern Helmand province, the center of the Afghan narcotics trade, Cleveland, the deputy chief for communications of the Resolute Support mission, said in a video briefing from Kabul to the Pentagon.

Taliban fighters in recent weeks essentially dropped the fight to assist in the harvest, giving respite to the struggling 215th Division of the Afghan National Security Forces in Helmand province, Cleveland said.

“A lot of the Taliban fighters have been out harvesting the poppy,” he said. Once the harvest is complete later this month, “We think that will be the next big Taliban push,” he said. “We think it will come in Helmand.”

The poppy trade in in Afghanistan supplies about 90 percent of the world’s heroin and is estimated by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to be worth about $3 billion annually to the Afghan economy.

Narcotics trafficking goes virtually unimpeded in Afghanistan. The U.S. has dropped its eradication and crop substitution efforts. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration still has an office in Kabul but no longer conducts field operations.

The United Nations estimated that the poppy crop fell by about 19 percent last year mostly due to poor weather, but plentiful rain this year was expected to produce a bumper crop.

“We are happy that we had a good harvest this year compared with previous years,” Abdul Rahim Mutmain, a farmer in Helmand, told The New York Times.

“There is no security concern for a single laborer being checked or robbed by the police,” he said. “The entire district is under Taliban control and the bulk of the harvesters are Taliban.”

A typical Afghan farmer can get $200 for a kilogram of opium produced from poppy, according to the United Nations. The same amount of green beans will fetch $1.

Cleveland said the U.S. has 700 to 800 troops in Helmand now to advise and assist the 215th Division in preparing for the expected Taliban offensive. The troops, including Special Forces and Army 10th Mountain Division troops, mostly work out of the grounds of the old Camp Leatherneck, the former headquarters for the U.S. Marine presence in Afghanistan, Cleveland said.

The Taliban’s strength and funding will be factors in the recommendations to higher command and President Barack Obama of Army Gen. John Nicholson, the new commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, on whether to continue with the planned U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Cleveland said Nicholson was expected to complete his assessment later this month. The U.S. currently has about 9,800 troops in Afghanistan and the current plan calls for that number to be reduced to about 5,500 by the end of this year.

Al-Qaeda Said To Boost Taliban Fight Against Afghan Government

al-Qaeda is working more closely with the Taliban in Afghanistan and could bolster the militant group’s fight against government forces, a NATO spokesman says.

“By themselves, we don’t think that they pose…a real significant threat, to the government of Afghanistan,” spokesman Brigadier General Charles Cleveland said on May 5.

“But because we think that Al-Qaeda is…beginning to work more with Taliban, they can present a bit of an accelerant for the Taliban. They can provide capabilities and skills and those types of things.”

Last fall, the head of Al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri, announced his backing for the new Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Mansur.

“Since that time, we have seen more interaction” between the two groups, Cleveland said.

He estimated that there are 100 to 300 Al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan.

“Although they have been significantly diminished, they do have the ability to regenerate very quickly, and they still do have the ability to pose a threat,” he said.

Cleveland said the Taliban will also get a boost this year from a bumper crop for poppies, its main source of funding.

***** The Afghanistan Failing Economy aids the Taliban

CNN: Several would-be recruits who talked to a local freelance cameraman working for CNN said the only reason they joined the Taliban was because they couldn’t put food on the table.

“I want to join them because of the lack of jobs and my other economic problems,” the first recruit told us.

OPINION: Why Obama can’t turn back on Afghans

The second man, who showed us his high school diploma, told us he’d been to university and still couldn’t find a job. The Taliban offered him more than he could earn in the army, he claimed.

“I don’t have anything to do with their viewpoints. My only reason to join them is my economical problems and unemployment,” he added.

A seven-month Taliban veteran who was trying to convince the pair to join their fight told us he’d been working for a foreign company who let him go when they ran out of contracts. It wasn’t long before he realized the Taliban were the only game in town, he said.

“I spent all my savings to feed my family and didn’t have another source of income, so I joined them.” More from CNN.

Illegal Border Crossings v. Visa Overstays

Posted on May 6, 2016May 6, 2016 by Denise Simon

No one can get the image of the train carrying illegals out of their memory and with good reason. When anyone does a search on the internet to determine the actual and factual numbers of immigrants coming across the southern border by year, you will be disappointed, the charts and records are not there. Countless outlets and agencies report but with caveats and obscure labels. Still we are told the border is as secure as it has ever been.

What is more chilling, are the reports that once again we are in a spike season of illegal entry due in part to threats of presidential candidates. Further, those already here are filing at an accelerated rate for citizenship for the exact same reason.

There is a clash however in the facts over which is worse, those coming across the border versus those coming in by air or other means possessing a v The Visa Waiver Program (VWP) enables most citizens or nationals of participating countries* to travel to the United States for tourism or business for stays of 90 days or less without first obtaining a visa, when they meet all requirements explained below. Travelers must have a valid Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) approval prior to travel. If you prefer to have a visa in your passport, you may still apply for a visitor (B) visa.isa that has an expiration date. Take note that any international airport across the United States is a port of entry. Once a visa is issued by State Department contractors, it becomes the burden of the Department of Homeland Security to ensure compliance to dates. This is where the problem, yet another lays with fault.

One cannot overlook the Visa Waiver Program concocted by the U.S. State Department of which several in Congress are calling for a suspension.

Citizens or nationals of the following countries* are currently eligible to travel to the United States under the VWP, unless citizens of one of these countries are also a national of Iraq, Iran, Syria, or Sudan.

Andorra Hungary Norway

Australia Iceland Portugal

Austria Ireland San Marino

Belgium Italy Singapore

Brunei Japan Slovakia

Chile Latvia Slovenia

Czech Republic Liechtenstein South Korea

Denmark Lithuania Spain

Estonia Luxembourg Sweden

Finland Malta Switzerland

France Monaco Taiwan*

Germany Netherlands United Kingdom**

Greece New Zealand

There are an estimated 35 unique types of visa classifications under the management of the U.S. State Department.

Obama Admin Deported Less Than One Percent of Visa Overstays

Nearly half a million individuals overstayed visas in 2015, fewer than 2,500 deported

Kredo/FreeBeacon: The Obama administration deported less than one percent of the nearly half a million foreign nationals who illegally overstayed their visas in 2015, according to new statistics published by the Department of Homeland Security.

Of the 482,781 aliens who were recorded to have overstayed temporary U.S. visas in fiscal year 2015, just 2,456 were successfully deported from the United States during the same period, according to DHS’s figures, which amounts to a deportation rate of around 0.5 percent.

The sinking rate of deportations by the Obama administration is drawing criticism from Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are warning that the administration is ignoring illegal overstays and potentially opening the United States to terrorist threats.

The 482,781 figure accounts for aliens who entered the United States on a nonimmigrant visitor visa or through the Visa Waiver Program, which streamlines travel between the United States and certain other countries. The figure encompasses foreign nationals who were found to have remained in the United States after their visas expired or after the 90-day window allowed by the Visa Waiver Program.

The actual number of overstays could be higher. The latest figures published by DHS do not include overstays from other visa categories or overstays by individuals who entered the United States through land ports, such as those along the Mexican border.

Deportations by the Obama administration have decreased steadily since 2009, according to figures codified by the Senate’s Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest and provided to the Washington Free Beacon.

Since 2009, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has expelled 51,704 individuals who overstayed their visas. The total number of those expelled has decreased every fiscal year.

At least 12,538 illegal overstays were deported in fiscal 2009, while 11,259 were removed in 2010, 10,426 in 2011, 6,856 in 2012, 4,240 in 2013, 3,564 in 2014, and 2,456 in 2015, according to the committee.

The drop is being attributed by sources to an Obama administration policy directing DHS and ICE not to pursue visa overstays unless the offender has been convicted of major crimes or terrorism.

“The decision by the Obama administration not to enforce immigration laws by allowing those who have overstayed their visas to remain in the country has not gone unnoticed by the American people,” sources on the Senate subcommittee told the Free Beacon. “A Rasmussen Reports poll released earlier this year indicates that approximately 3 out of 4 Americans not only want the Obama administration to find these aliens who overstay their visas, but also to deport them.”

“The same poll indicates that 68 percent of Americans consider visa overstays a ‘serious national security risk,’ and 31 percent consider visa overstays a ‘very serious’ national security risk,” according to the sources.

Congress has long mandated the implementation of a biometric entry-exit system to track individuals who overstay their visas and ensure they leave the United States.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), chair of the Senate’s immigration subcommittee, recently proposed an amendment aimed at speeding up implementation of this system. Senate Democrats blocked the amendment.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has received substantially more taxpayer money in recent years despite the plummeting rate of deportations. At least 43 percent fewer aliens were removed from the United States from 2012 to 2015, according to DHS statistics.