Texas Sheriff, Immigration Truths

Posted on February 16, 2016February 16, 2016 by Denise Simon

Texas Sheriffs, Jails on Immigration Front Line

TexasTribune: With a $6 billion budget and more than 20,000 employees, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stands poised to seize and deport immigrants — undocumented or not — who commit serious crimes in the United States.

Provided someone else catches them.

The behemoth agency at the center of the nation’s immigration enforcement efforts has no proactive way — watch lists, data mining or the like — to systematically search for dangerous undocumented immigrants, including those who have returned to the United States after being deported for committing crimes.

Instead, if an immigrant criminal is caught and thrown out of the country, the process most likely begins when a local police officer or sheriff’s deputy pulls them over for a traffic stop or arrests them as part of a criminal investigation.

The success of federal deportation policy in Texas and nationwide depends for the most part on a heads up from county sheriffs. They run the jails where people are taken when arrested and where the culling of criminal immigrants begins.

Being at the bottom of the enforcement pyramid places tremendous pressure on them — political, legal and otherwise — sheriffs say, and with federal policy increasingly targeting serious, repeat criminal offenders, their role in the process has grown.

“When some of these sheriffs talk about bringing in an undocumented, it may be one a month,” said Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez. “With us, it’s several a day.”

The legal tool federal authorities use to take custody of immigrants they want is the detainer. Around in some form or fashion since the 1950s, detainers are notices sent to jails asking them to hold on to an immigrant once local authorities are done with them so federal agents can come by and get them.

In its latest incarnation, the detainer is reserved for the most serious convicted immigrant criminals. This new, narrower restriction, imposed in November 2014, has caused the number of detainers to drop. As of October 2015, the latest monthly figure available, 7,117 detainers were issued. That’s down from an all-time monthly high of 27,755 in August 2011, according to voluminous Freedom of Information Act requests made by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Texas is central to the federal agency’s deportation efforts. Nationwide, only eight jails received more than 1,000 detainer requests in the last year, according to clearinghouse data. Four were in Texas — Harris, Travis, Dallas and Hidalgo counties.

A report last year on the federal agency’s enforcement operations shows it plucked 139,368 people from the nation’s jails and prisons during the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2015. That accounted for about 59 percent of the total number of people ICE removed from the country that year for a variety of reasons.

Many came from Texas, screened out of state prisons or found among the approximately 71,000 people who are booked into local Texas jails each month, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. On average, 3,724 undocumented immigrants were detained in Texas jails each month in 2015, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of immigration detainer reports from the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.

Between December 2012 and October 2015, undocumented immigrants who sat in Texas county jails cost taxpayers a total of $210.6 million, according to reports filed with the Texas Commission on Jail Standards that were released to The Texas Tribune.

In 2015, the federal government provided about $12 million to Texas to care for incarcerated undocumented immigrants. Most of that – more than $8 million – went to the Texas prison system, not jails.

Yet for all the statistics, no federal, state or local agency can claim it has a handle on the number of criminal aliens in the country, how many crimes they are responsible for and what share the system catches.

Local options

In Harris, the state’s most populous county, 135,000 inmates each year come through the jailhouse doors. It and the city of Carrollton are the only two Texas jurisdictions that contract with the federal government to have immigration agents stationed at its jail helping pinpoint criminal immigrants. Nine federal officers and nine Harris County deputies schooled in federal procedures comb booking documents and interview inmates suspected of being in the country illegally.

by: Martin do Nascimento

A guard inside the Webb County Jail in Laredo, TX, on Nov. 5, 2015.

By contrast, in Brewster County, the state’s geographically largest — as in, bigger than some states — things work a bit differently. About 9,200 people live in the West Texas county, and its jail in Alpine has no official policy for handling undocumented immigrants.

How does it strive to alert federal authorities when a criminal immigrant is arrested? “We’ve got a sign on the wall,” jail administrator Lora Nussbaum told the Tribune, referring to a torn ICE flier taped on a jail wall that lists the agency’s phone number.

County jails may be the front line of efforts to keep undocumented immigrants who commit serious crimes from slipping through the cracks, but the state of Texas has no uniform method of going about that task, or measuring the scope of the problem.

To gain a better picture of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants and how counties handle them, the Tribune asked for booking data and immigration procedure policies from 26 Texas counties, including the state’s 10 most populous.

Almost none would provide it. Some, like Montgomery and Presidio counties, insisted that providing booking information, including an inmate’s date of birth, violated the inmate’s right to privacy. Harris County claimed that releasing a list of noncitizens was essentially creating new information — something the Texas Public Information Act does not require a governmental body to do.

Some counties argued that that federal law specifically prohibits releasing information about immigrants.

Attorney General Ken Paxton‘s office upheld most of the counties’ arguments, saying state open records laws don’t compel release of the information.

The Dallas County Sheriff’s Office went a step further and insisted that booking records are court records and, as such, are not subject to the state’s open records law. The attorney general’s office agreed, blocking their release.

Five counties responded to the Tribune’s request for booking data: Brewster, Nueces, Fort Bend, Travis and Tarrant. Of those, only Travis responded with enough detailed information to analyze.

“We don’t want to be in a position where somebody loses their life because of something we didn’t do that was legal for us to do.”— Maj. Wes Priddy, chief administrator for Travis County jails

The numbers show that Travis County booked about 20,000 inmates with federal immigration detainers between 2008 and 2015, facing charges that were roughly evenly divided between felonies and misdemeanors. More than 7,000 of those inmates faced drunk driving charges, the most common charge by far. That was followed by family violence-related assault charges, which about 1,900 inmates faced. An estimated 2,400 of the total inmates were repeat offenders.

Maj. Wes Priddy, chief administrator for Travis County jails, said local law enforcement’s primary concern was public safety, not investigating immigration status. But he said that part of keeping dangerous people off the streets involved close cooperation with federal authorities.

“We don’t want to be in a position where somebody loses their life because of something we didn’t do that was legal for us to do,” Priddy said.

After arresting someone, the Department of Public Safety, county sheriffs, and even the Texas Department of Criminal Justice — the nation’s largest prison system — all have to rely on the federal government to inform them who is in the United States illegally.

“What our obligation is, is to provide ICE with the population information,” said Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson. “They go through it. They determine who they’re going to put a hold on and who they’re not, and our people don’t really have a way to further investigate are they truly here legally or not.”

That typically happens during the booking process, when a suspect’s fingerprints are sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a procedure used for every new inmate. If the fingerprints match a profile in the federal database of non-U.S. citizens with previous criminal histories, ICE can decide to ask for a detainer. Texas jail officers do ask arrestees to name their country of birth as a part of the booking process, but an arrested immigrant’s answer is written down without being verified.

The same holds true for inmates in Texas prison. As of Nov. 30, 2015, three-fourths of the 9,135 inmates in the Texas prison system with ICE detainers were in the United States illegally. The remainder include those serving time for crimes who had legal immigration status.

“Ultimately, ICE will make the determination whether that person is in country illegally,” said Texas prisons spokesman Jason Clark. In 2010, the agency began asking for ICE help verifying those among the system’s 148,000 inmates who were illegally in the country.

But the federal tracking system of verifying what law enforcement refers to as “criminal aliens” is less than precise. It relies on someone’s fingerprints being in the system because they have been arrested before. If an undocumented immigrant has never encountered law enforcement, the federal tracking system might not notice their first arrest.

Jumbled numbers

There is no definitive data showing that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a higher rate than the citizen population, and a few indications that in Texas they do not.

The Pew Research Center estimates undocumented immigrants comprise about seven percent of the Texas population. On average, 3,724 undocumented immigrants were detained in Texas jails each month in 2015, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of immigration detainer reports from the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.

Of the 148,000 inmates held in 100 Texas prison units, about 9,135 inmates have federal detainers asking that they be handed to federal officials when their sentences are complete. Not all were in the country illegally when arrested. Those that were illegal account for about 6 percent of the prison population.

Nationwide, almost 60 percent of immigrants who are deported had some previous criminal charges, according to 2015 numbers from ICE.

by: Martin do Nascimento

A group of undocumented Mexican nationals who were convicted of crimes in the U.S. enter Mexico at the US-Mexico border crossing at Brownsville/Matamoros after being deported from the United States on Nov 4, 2015.

The Pew Center, relying on 2012 U.S. Census numbers, estimated that Texas has 1.7 million undocumented immigrants, ranking second in the nation. What portion of that 1.7 million is responsible for crimes is a tougher calculus.

Estimates from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which gets the information from jails, are considered inaccurate because there’s no uniform requirement to verify citizenship during the jail booking process.

In 2014, then-Gov. Rick Perry was criticized for relying on DPS’ first attempts to calculate the impact of crimes committed by immigrants. That year, Perry repeated the department’s claim that “criminal aliens” had committed more than 642,000 crimes in Texas since 2008. It was later revealed that “criminal aliens” referred to all foreign-born immigrants in Texas, not just those in the state illegally, and the “crimes” counted included charges, not convictions, some dating back decades.

One year later, DPS tried to clarify the numbers, but even director Steve McCraw, appearing before the Texas House Committee on State Affairs in December, tried to lower expectations about the “criminal alien statistic” his agency featured on its website.

“It’s an undercount,” McCraw testified on Dec 10. “We acknowledge it woefully undercounts the amount, but it does accurately count the ones who are in fact here and the ones who have committed crimes.”

The DPS statistics continue to confuse both the public and lawmakers.

ICE officials consider a foreign national — here legally or otherwise — a “criminal alien” if they’ve been convicted of a crime. DPS broadens the definition to include foreign nationals who have only been arrested.

“Criminal alien is a foreign national with a criminal record,” explained DPS Assistant Director Skylor Hearn, who oversees the agency’s law enforcement support division, which includes the state’s crime records. “There was probable cause to arrest them for something, and it would apply to the rest of us as well, generally speaking. If you’ve been arrested, you have a criminal record; you are not a criminal, but you have a criminal record.”

By DPS’s count, 177,060 foreign-born individuals were charged with crimes from 2011 through Jan. 31. That’s a much larger number than those foreign nationals actually convicted during the same time frame in Texas: 84,182 non-U.S. citizens. Of those, 58,128 were determined to be in the United States unlawfully.

State Rep. Cesar Blanco, D-El Paso, says the DPS numbers on “criminal aliens” are artificially pumped up by counting the number of criminal charges filed against undocumented immigrants instead of actual convictions. Charges are routinely dismissed for lack of evidence or other reasons, he noted.

But by hyping the number of charges, the agency bolsters the argument for more border security money. Last year, the Texas Legislature approved an additional $800 million for border security.

“When crime rates were higher in this state, did the legislature move this much money?” Blanco asked.

Adding to the mathematical murkiness, immigration status can be fluid. A foreign-born Texas jail inmate could be legally in the country at the time of one arrest but have an expired visa by the next arrest and be undocumented the second time around, further bedeviling Texas’ attempts at measuring unauthorized immigrants’ impact on the state’s criminal justice system.

Attempts by DPS to connect criminal aliens to their crimes also fall short.

The agency’s data, obtained by the Tribune, shows that 177,060 non-U.S. citizens arrested from 2011 through Jan. 31 were charged with 252,083 offenses during that time. This is less than what DPS reports on its own website because the agency counts crimes committed over a U.S. citizen’s lifetime, outside the five-year span.

DPS officials insist that its criminal alien counts, based on federal immigration data, are not an attempt to construe that foreign-born criminals are a greater threat than U.S. citizens.

“The department has not made that statement and does not have information to support that statement,” DPS spokeswoman Summer Blackwell said in a statement. “The Department of Public Safety believes any individual who has committed a violent crime or is party to criminal activities — no matter their citizenship status or country of origin — is considered a potential threat to public safety and the security of Texas.”

Just say no

Even when federal immigration authorities decide they want to take immigrants from the state criminal justice system into custody, there can be obstacles.

Federal records obtained by the Tribune show that in more than 18,000 cases over the past two years, local jails across the country failed to hand over deportable immigrants to federal authorities. Jurisdictions in many states, including Pennsylvania, California and Colorado, have become reluctant to honor the detainers after facing a series of lawsuits from inmates challenging the constitutional legitimacy of the extended detention.

Further information about the outcomes in cases where local officials declined to detain someone — whether those inmates, many with previous criminal histories, had been released to the public — proved difficult to come by, even in Texas, where there were only 146 such cases.

Of the 11 state jails contacted by the Tribune, only one could provide definitive answers about what had happened with declined detainers in its jurisdiction.

In Collin County north of Dallas, where agency records show two declined detainers, one for an inmate with a criminal history, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office said it “would literally be too manpower-intensive and potentially impossible to locate the reasons they were released.”

The Texas county with the most declined detainers — Travis, which had 72 instances, including 33 on inmates with a prior criminal history — referred all questions about the records to the federal government.

“I do not know how ICE came up with those numbers and we do not keep stats for ICE,” Travis County Sheriff’s office spokesman Roger Wade said in an email. “You will have to ask ICE how they arrived at those numbers and what their definition is of declining detainers.”

The federal agency itself could not verify further details about the cases. An ICE official, who lacked authorization to comment and thus spoke on condition of anonymity, said a small number of the cases could be a result of administrative errors at the federal or local level.

But beyond that, the official said it would be “resource-prohibitive” to determine what exactly happened in the individual circumstances.

Step away from the direct cost to jails to house undocumented immigrants — and the troubling lack of standardized record keeping — and there’s the added pressure of keeping up with the federal government’s ever-shifting parameters of who in local jails is eligible for deportation.

On Nov. 20, 2014, ICE’s parent, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, discontinued a policy known as Secure Communities in favor of a new plan called the Priority Enforcement Program. Secure Communities — which targeted anyone in the United States illegally — had faced fierce pushback from local officials across the country who feared legal liability under the program.

With the new program, the federal agency decided to focus its deportation efforts on undocumented immigrants who committed the most serious crimes.

In congressional testimony and internal documents detailing the new policy’s implementation, ICE officials have stressed the importance of local cooperation. A 2015 memo from the federal immigration agency describes “expansive efforts to encourage state and local law enforcement partners” to collaborate with the agency.

The program was developed to “bring back on board those state and local jurisdictions that had concerns with, or legal obstacles to, assisting us,” said ICE Director Sarah Saldaña in July testimony before a congressional committee.

But the federal agency has opposed requiring local authorities to honor immigration detainers. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told members of the House Judiciary Committee in July that it would a “huge setback” to mandate compliance with immigration policy.

“I do not believe that mandating through federal legislation the conduct of sheriffs and police chiefs is the way to go,” he said. “I think it will be hugely controversial. I think it will have problems with the Constitution. I want to see us work cooperatively with state and local law enforcement, and I believe they are poised to do that.”

The voluntary guidelines from federal authorities can leave local officials in a politically precarious position — often, no matter what decision they make will land them in hot water.

Jurisdictions in Democratically controlled urban areas face intense pressure from activists critical of federal immigration policy to cease any cooperation with ICE.

“Our ideal situation would be for there to be no ICE collaboration whatsoever,” said Carolina Canizales, the San Antonio-based deportation defense director of United We Dream, a national immigrant rights organization, which regularly stages protests at jails in the state, in an October interview. “I think they shouldn’t condemn thousands of undocumented immigrants for one crime that has been committed.”

At the same time, state lawmakers are on the watch for any sign that county sheriffs are failing to hold unauthorized immigrants singled out by ICE for deportation until federal ICE officers can pick them up and return them to their home country.

Take the case of Dallas County Sheriff Valdez, who throughout her time in office has most often found herself in the crosshairs of immigrant rights activists. She currently faces a lawsuit alleging her jail has held immigrants for unconstitutionally long periods of time even after they received bond.

But recently, she has become better known for the harsh public denunciation she received from Gov. Greg Abbott, who wrote her a letter saying that what he viewed as lacking enforcement of federal immigration policy posed a “serious danger to Texans.”

Abbott’s letter came after Valdez told reporters in October she would review federal detainers placed on inmates in her jail on a case-by-case basis and would not hold immigrants arrested for minor crimes for up to 48 hours for ICE officers.

Her comments seemed to mirror ICE’s changed focus on the most serious immigrant criminals — but before she had a chance to clarify, Abbott blasted her stance and threatened to cut off grants to any sheriff’s office choosing to not abide by federal immigration detainers.

Valdez said late last year that her statement was taken out of context.

“What I said was, when there’s a disagreement (over whether a jail inmate was undocumented or not) we look at it case-by-case,” Valdez told the Tribune in December. “But in this whole time we haven’t had a disagreement … The feds and I are great. ICE and I are fine.”

Where are the War Dogs? Soldiers are Desperate

Posted on February 15, 2016February 15, 2016 by Denise Simon

Troops betrayed as Army dumps hundreds of heroic war dogs

NYPost: By now, Daniel had been in Afghanistan two months. It was July 2012, his third tour of duty and his first with Oogie, his military working dog. They were leading their platoon on yet another patrol, clearing a no-name village with maybe 15 houses and one mosque, when they began taking fire.

“The first thing that went though my mind,” he says, “was, ‘S- -t. My dog’s gonna get shot.’ ”

It was a perfect L-shaped ambush, bullets coming from the front and the right, the platoon pinned down in a flat, open landscape. Along the road were shallow trenches, no more than 14 inches deep. Daniel grabbed Oogie, squeezed him in a hole, then threw himself over his dog.

It went against all his Army training. “They tell us it’s better for a dog to step on a bomb than a US soldier,” he says. The truth is Daniel, like just about every other dog handler in the armed forces, would rather take the hit himself.

Five weeks into their training, Daniel and Oogie were inseparable. They showered together. They went to the bathroom together. When Daniel ran on the treadmill, Oogie was on the one right next to him, running along.

That week, Daniel got Oogie’s paw print tattooed on his chest.

“The few times you safeguard your dog are slim compared to what he does every time you go outside the wire,” Daniel says. “That’s your dog. The dog saves you and saves your team. You’re walking behind this dog in known IED hot spots. In a firefight, the dog doesn’t understand.”

Bullets were coming closer now; the enemy had long ago picked up on how important the dogs were to the Americans, how successful they were at sniffing out bombs. “I know there were three separate incidents where they shot at Oogie,” Daniel says. And as he lay on top of his dog, he stroked him and whispered and kept him calm.

After five minutes, Daniel’s platoon pushed the enemy back and away, and the first thing Daniel did was get Oogie to shade. “He’s a black Lab, and it was very hot out,” he says. He strapped two big bags of saline to Oogie’s shoulders and hydrated him intravenously, then the two went back out to clear more villages.

“Oogie’s always ready to go,” Daniel says. “He’d hurt himself if I didn’t stop him — he has that much prey drive.”

In September 2012, Daniel and about 18 other soldiers boarded a flight back to North Carolina; their deployment was over.

Waiting on the tarmac were employees from a North Carolina-based company, K2 Solutions, which had the government contract for the dogs. Within moments of deplaning, the handlers got to pat their dogs on the head, say their goodbyes, then watch as the dogs — and all their equipment, down to their shredded leashes — were boarded on a truck and driven away.

“It’s a bunch of infantry guys, and no one wants to be the first to start crying,” Daniel says. “But it didn’t take long. There wasn’t a dry eye.”

Daniel got Oogie’s paw print tattooed on his chest

The only solace these soldiers had was the knowledge that they could apply to adopt their dogs, and that the passage of Robby’s Law in November 2000 would protect that right.

More than three years later, Daniel still doesn’t have Oogie. The dog has vanished.

Daniel, who doesn’t want to use his real name because he’s on active duty, is one of at least 200 military handlers whose dogs were secretly dumped out to civilians by K2 Solutions in February 2014, a Post investigation has found.

At least three government workers were also involved and may have taken dogs for themselves.

It’s a scandal that continues to this day, with hundreds of handlers still searching for their dogs — and the Army, the Pentagon and K2 Solutions covering up what happened, and what may still be happening.

Dumping dogs

On Feb. 10, 2014, one of many adoption events was held on the grounds of K2 Solutions in Southern Pines, NC. The Army had recently ended its TEDD (Tactical Explosive Detection Dogs) program, and word quietly got out that “bomb dogs” would be available to civilians.

Kim Scarborough, 52, a project manager at East Carolina University, was one of them. “I called my husband and said, ‘K2’s dumping dogs. Do you mind if I go?’ ”

In quiet, well-manicured Southern Pines, K2 is a glamorous company. They own huge tracts of land where they covertly train dogs for combat, counterterrorism and catastrophes that will probably never occur in North Carolina. K2’s owner, Lane Kjellsen, is a cryptic figure who claims to be ex-special forces.

The company is privately held. Their Web site advertises dogs for sale, but it’s unclear whether they’re former military working dogs. K2 has trained dogs for both the TEDD program and the Marine Corps’ IDD (Improvised Explosive Device Detector Dog) program, and each canine has about $75,000 to $100,000 worth of training.

Multiple handlers told The Post that they have called and e-mailed K2 repeatedly about their dogs, submitting adoption paperwork as they were instructed to do. Yet they have been given little to no information, and at times deliberate misdirection, they say. Finding military dogs isn’t hard: They all have microchips, and the TEDD dogs have serial numbers tattooed on their ears.

These handlers also say K2 trainers who were with them in Iraq and Afghanistan told them they should contact K2, or K2 would contact them, once their dogs were available for adoption.

“When I contacted K2, they were like, ‘She’s gone and adopted out,’ ” says Brian Kornse, who did three tours of duty and has PTSD. “I got in contact with them in February of 2014” — the same month K2 was holding multiple adoption events.

Kornse believes his dog, a black Lab named Fistik, was given to a former Pentagon employee, Leo Gonnering, who may still have been working for the government in 2014. A man who left a voicemail for The Post from “Leo’s phone” said Gonnering “adopted the dog from the Army two years ago. He and his family have no intention of giving the dog up to his prior handler.” He named Kornse as the likely handler and has renamed the dog Mystic.

“I guess I had PTSD before, but I never really noticed till I gave Fistik up,” Kornse says. “I started having nightmares. I never experienced that before. She made everything better for me — that’s the best way I can describe it.”

Other handlers say K2 would tell them information about their dogs was “privileged” and instruct them to call Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. Staff at Lackland, they say, would send them right back to K2.

‘I guess I had PTSD before, but I never really noticed till I gave Fistik up…She made everything better for me — that’s the best way I can describe it’

– Brian Kornse said about giving up his dog

“I called K2 in March 2014,” says a handler who asked to remain anonymous. “I said, ‘Can you please help me find my dog?’ They said, ‘No. Call Lackland.’ ”

This handler sent The Post an e-mail exchange he had with Lackland. He asked for help, and a Sgt. Tia Jordan replied, “I’m sorry, but we don’t have any control over TEDD dog adoptions.” Under her signature is her office: the Military Working Dogs Adoptions and Dispositions Center.

“We got blown up together,” he says of his dog. “Before I was even done with training, I knew I’d try to adopt him.”

After months of obfuscation, many handlers give up, and they believe that’s what K2, and some in the Army, want. “I have PTSD and traumatic brain injury,” says Ryan Henderson, who has been searching for his dog, Satan, since 2014. “There are mornings I wake up with anxiety attacks. Dealing with normal life is more than I can handle anyway.”

Henderson says K2 told him Satan had been adopted by his second handler “and they could not give me his information due to privacy laws.”

He believes there’s a thriving black market for the dogs.

“Ninety dogs adopted out, at the same time, under suspicious circumstances?” he says. “Subcontractors are literally another layer of insulation to cover the BS.”

K2’s Web site offers a standard reply to service members looking for their dogs: “All of the dogs in the TEDD program belonged to the Army,” they state. K2 directs handlers to the Army’s Office of the Provost Marshal General.

At least one staffer from the OPMG, Robert Squires, was at K2’s adoption event on Feb. 10. Sources who were there tell The Post that Squires was overseeing it all. He also signed reams of paperwork, telling adopters that copies would be mailed to them.

That paperwork was never sent. According to e-mails obtained by The Post, both Squires and another OPMG staffer, Richard Vargus, jointly play dumb.

“Everyone was under the impression that they tried to locate the handlers,” Scarborough says.

Meanwhile, civilians in small North Carolina towns were electrified by the idea of owning a war dog — the ultimate status symbol — and several deputized themselves as prime “bomb dog” movers.

“On Feb. 7, I got a call from my dear friend . . . who asked me to help her with a favor,” Kinston, NC, resident Jean Culbreth wrote on Facebook on Feb. 19, 2014. “The favor was to place 72 retired bomb-sniffing dogs in new homes. Well, it’s 10 days later and I am BEYOND thrilled to say that 92 dogs have been adopted! And with the 11 Ralph and I took for the Lenoir Co. SPCA, I had a part in 103 adoptions in 10 days. Man, I wish we could do this every week. To all involved: GREAT JOB.”

When reached for comment, Culbreth hung up.

‘A clusterf@#&’

When Scarborough arrived at K2’s adoption event, she was stunned. “I called my husband and said, ‘This is the biggest clusterf–k I’ve ever seen.’ We were a bunch of strangers who responded to Jean’s Facebook post.”

They had been told 140 dogs would be available, but just 30 were left. It was only 11 a.m. There were people claiming to be law enforcement who were not in uniform — and law enforcement was given first pick.

Some said they planned to contract out the dogs. One of the few officers in tiny Taylortown, population 1,012, took six dogs. Two men from Virginia, Dean Henderson and Jamie Solis, rolled up with a box truck and took 13.

“All of these dogs have PTSD,” Scarborough says. “Squires said that to me.”

None of the people who sought to adopt was vetted. None was asked what they planned to do with the dogs, or if they were capable of dealing with a dog with war wounds. None was asked whether they had small children.

“That was something that really bothered us,” says an ex-K2 employee who was there that day. He asked not to be identified. “The dog I have, it took me more than a year to calm her down. She was a TEDD. I wouldn’t let her be around children.”

He believes no civilian should ever be allowed to adopt a military working dog. “Civilians don’t understand what these dogs have been through in war,” he says.

‘That was something that really bothered us…Civilians don’t understand what these dogs have been through in war’

– an ex-K2 employee

This employee says that during the event, he was “getting dogs out of the kennel and displaying them to people.” He knew it was wrong. “Too many civilians were getting dogs that should have gone to handlers. It wasn’t right.”

He says handlers were calling him constantly, complaining that the Army and K2 “keep losing my s- -t.” He also says K2 was in collusion with Army officials. “Squires was there and signing paperwork. He adopted two TEDD dogs. One was Fistik” — Kornse’s dog. Vargus, he says, “was the head of the program. He knew what was going on.” Vargus is also believed to have taken at least two dogs.

This employee says he kept Squires from taking at least one dog. “I talked to Squires and said, ‘I know this handler wants this dog.’ They let me take him.”

The Army confirmed to The Post that Vargus was in charge of policy of the TEDD program, but refused to comment on any involvement he, Squires or Gonnering had in these adoptions, or dogs they are alleged to have taken.

“All TEDD adoptions were performed in accordance with the law,” the Army said in a statement. “The Army will continue to carry out standard adoptions in accordance with the disposition procedures established by the law and the Department of Defense.”

Scars of war

Once Scarborough got her dog, Ben, she was directed to a room where an Army veterinarian was waiting. The dogs were getting five-minute exams — temperature, teeth checks — before being shunted off K2 grounds.

She was apparently the first civilian the doctor saw that day.

“They got to me and it stops,” she says. “The veterinarian was clearly very upset. She just stopped doing the exams.” The doctor left the room, but Scarborough and others could overhear her. Scarborough believes the veterinarian was on the phone with superiors.

“She was saying, ‘I don’t know what to do. This is not what we normally do.’ She was very disturbed, very distraught.”

After several hours, the veterinarian returned. The dogs remained muzzled the entire time. “She said she was told, ‘Let it go — proceed,’ ” Scarborough says. That doctor, Capt. Sarah T. Watkins, Branch OIC at Fort Bragg, signed Ben’s medical records.

Scarborough was given those along with her dog’s deployment records — something every handler who spoke with The Post had no idea existed. A copy obtained by The Post shows that next to each dog’s name and serial number is the name of their handler, refuting claims by the Army and K2 that tracking down a dog’s handler is too difficult.

Scarborough encountered similar stonewalling when she requested Ben’s military papers.

“There is no ‘official’ Army record since he was technically a contract dog,” Squires told Scarborough in an e-mail dated July 25, 2014, “but by regulation he is classified as a Military Working Dog.”

Scarborough realized she had no business adopting Ben.

“It wasn’t till I got home that I said, ‘Oh, my God. I’ve got a bomb dog that couldn’t make it as a patrol dog and has PTSD.” She says that on the way home from the K2 adoption event, Ben freaked out when he heard sirens.

‘I’ve offered $5,000 cash, plus a new German shepherd of their choosing, for his return. I have heard nothing’

– Army veteran Ryan Henderson

When he hears thunder, or gunfire — Scarborough and her husband live on a farm where they allow hunting — Ben races through the house and hides under her husband’s desk, or jumps into bed with her “shaking like a leaf.”

Scarborough says she and Ben’s handler got in touch a few days ago with help from online group Justice for TEDD Handlers, run by Betsy Hampton, a civilian.

Scarborough says the handler is overwhelmed to have found Ben.

“He said to me, ‘That’s my Ben. That dog saved my life. I owe him.’ I mean, ladies from the Daughters of the American Revolution have these dogs,” she says. “If the handler wants Ben, it belongs to him. Period, the end.”

Handlers don’t typically get that response. Many who have found their dogs over social media are rebuffed. More than one has been told their dog ran away, or was hit by a car.

Army veteran Ryan Henderson has tracked his dog, Satan, to a family in Chocowinity, NC.

“I’ve offered $5,000 cash, plus a new German shepherd of their choosing, for his return,” Henderson says. “I have heard nothing. They refuse to contact me.”

Ryan Henderson with his dog, Satan, whom he has been trying to get back since 2014.

Every handler The Post spoke with stressed this point: The dogs are not just dogs, or “equipment,” as the Army designates them. They are battle-scarred veterans who have saved lives.

‘Destroy the dogs’

The 13 dogs Dean Henderson and Jamie Solis took from K2 were, in fact, treated like outdated equipment. On the night of Feb. 10, 2014, the two men drove up to Currituck Kennels at Mt. Hope in Va., the dogs sliding around the back of their truck the whole way.

“Half of the dogs were on human Prozac and Xanax,” kennel master Greg Meredith tells The Post. “They were emaciated. They all had PTSD. One had an injury to his tail from shrapnel.”

The men told Meredith they were ex-Secret Service, had just bought the dogs for $30,000 each, and had a contract to sell them to the Panamanian government for twice that amount.

The paperwork given out at K2 that day included a document stating the adopter could not give a dog away, sell it, or profit from it. “If they lied to K2 and were planning to sell, they’d be in serious amounts of s- -t,” says the ex-K2 employee. “That’s illegal. And if K2 knew about that, that’s even more illegal.”

Seventeen months went by. Meredith had spent nearly $150,000 of his own money caring for the dogs and was broke. He pressed Henderson for help.

“Destroy the dogs” was the reply.

Meredith called K2, who sent him to Vargus. He provided The Post with e-mails between himself, Vargus and Squires.

In a phone call, “Vargus tells me they couldn’t determine who had ownership at that point — the contractors or DoD,” Meredith says. Vargus’ office is at the Pentagon, which houses the Department of Defense.

“He told me he was there when Dean and Jamie picked them up,” Meredith says. “He knows them. They’re known to him. I said, ‘I’ve been told these dogs can’t be re-purposed or resold, but Dean and Jamie told me they paid $30K a piece for these dogs.’ I said, ‘There’s a coverup going on here.’ ”

Henderson and Solis did not return calls for comment.

‘My best friend’

The handlers, understandably, trust no one. Adam Wopat served for five years and did two tours . He spent a year in combat with his dog, Heijn, in Kandahar.

On May 30, 2012, while sweeping a compound with the 4th Infantry Division, an IED went off. One soldier lost a leg. Another was medevaced out. Wopat was knocked back and unconscious, and Heijn was blown way behind him.

“Once I got up and came to my senses, I realized, ‘Oh, I still have a dog,’ because he had already returned to me and was laying down next to me.”

Wopat is crying now. “After we hit our one-month mark of training — it’s like when a son calls you ‘Daddy,’ ” he says.

Last year, Wopat was contacted by a man named John Moreno, who said he founded an organization called Operation Releash in May 2015 to reunite veterans with their dogs.

“He told me US Capitol Police had him. He told me they were going to fly us up on Veterans Day, and to wear a suit and tie,” Wopat recalls. Moreno said they were going to retire Heijn and re-home him with Wopat.

“On Oct. 19th, the day he told me to call him on his new cellphone, he ceases contact with me,” Wopat says.

Moreno is ex-K2. He most recently worked as executive director of the Worcester County Humane Society in Maryland, a position he left after six weeks. “He was not caring for the dogs,” a former colleague tells The Post.

Moreno confirms Wopat’s version of events. Asked why he disappeared, Moreno told The Post: “A lot of stuff was going on at the time. I wanted to be left alone.”

Former Marine Nick Beckham says he knows where his IDD dog, Lucky, is: Living with K2 CEO Lane Kjellsen in North Carolina. Beckham says he was tipped off by a K2 employee.

“K2 told me I had the right to adopt if I was the first handler and the dogs were retired,” Beckham says. “I called K2 and asked for paperwork. I filled it out and mailed it in and I never heard back. I e-mailed again — they never responded.”

Reached Wednesday, Kjellsen admitted many adoption events had taken place at K2. “Hundreds of dogs were adopted out,” he said. “Let me take that back. Not hundreds, but more than 100.”

K2 CEO Lane Kjellsen (left) adopted former Marine Nick Beckham’s dog, Lucky

He went on to claim that “K2 had nothing to do with adopting those dogs.”

Asked if he had an IDD dog named Lucky, he said, “Lucky? Is that true? Um . . . I don’t know. I do have a dog named Lucky.”

He then admitted he had sold Lucky to the Marine Corps, and once retired, “the Marine Corps repeatedly reached out to the handler and had no luck. I properly adopted Lucky through normal channels. K2 didn’t handle any adoption paperwork.”

Kjellsen then suggested the Army was to blame for all the war dogs who have been wrongly and secretly re-homed, but he refused to give The Post specifics.

“I would say, ‘Get an official investigation and let me talk,’ ” Kjellsen says. “I’d tell them what the Army did. I can’t [tell you]. I need to be subpoenaed.”

Beckham is disconsolate to this day. “Lucky was my first and only dog,” he says. “He was my best friend.”

Cuban Migrants Flood the SW Border

Posted on February 15, 2016February 15, 2016 by Denise Simon

2015: At Least 44,000 Cubans Entered US Through Texas and Southern Border This Year, Number on the Rise – Report

The number of Cubans attempting to come to the Unites States via Texas has increased this year, thanks in large part to the thaw in political tensions between the U.S. and Cuba.

After President Obama and Cuban leader Raul Castro announced their plans to normalize relations between the two nations, many Cubans feared that the special migrant status they have enjoyed for over 50 years would come to an end. The current “wet foot, dry foot policy” allows anyone who has fled Cuba and entered the U.S. the ability to pursue residency and work in the country.

The Los Angles Times reports that at least 44,000 Cubans have reached the southern U.S. border during the fiscal year which ended in September. This figure is more than twice as many of the 17,466 Cubans who came through the southern border the year before. Full article here.

Tension Simmers as Cubans Breeze Across U.S. Border

LAREDO, Tex. — They are crossing the border here by the hundreds each day, approved to enter the United States in a matter of hours. Part of a fast-rising influx of Cubans, they walk out to a Laredo street and are greeted by volunteers from Cubanos en Libertad, or Cubans in Freedom, who help them arrange travel to their American destination — often Miami — and start applying for work permits and federal benefits like food stamps and Medicaid, available by law to Cubans immediately after their arrival.

The friendly reception given the Cubans, an artifact of hostile relations with the Castro government, is a stark contrast with the treatment of Central American families fleeing violence in their countries. And it is creating tensions in this predominantly Mexican-American city, where residents saw how Central American migrants, who came in an influx in 2014, were detained by the Border Patrol and ordered to appear in immigration courts.

“The people here are starting to feel resentment,” said Representative Henry Cuellar, Democrat of Texas, whose congressional district includes the city. “They are asking, is it fair that the Cubans get to stay and the Central Americans are being deported?”

The disparity will be in sharp relief next week when Pope Francis comes to the border at El Paso to offer prayers for the many migrants who have faced danger or arrest trying to cross the United States border.

Town officials have warned Cubans not to loiter in the streets. Local bus companies complain that Cubans are chartering special vans to travel. Some residents here have also begun to speak up.

A group of veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq held two protests by the border bridge in recent weeks, saying the federal government was spending money on Cubans when it was not meeting the needs of people here.

“We make everyone from Central America wait in line, while the Cubans walk in even though they are not refugees,” said Gabriel Lopez, a Mexican-American Navy veteran who is president of the group of veterans. “We are saying, don’t open the borders to Cubans and give them instant benefits while we have American veterans living on the streets.”

In coming weeks the number of Cubans is expected to spike, as more than 5,000 who have been stalled in Costa Rica since late last year will leave there on regular plane flights agreed to by governments in Central America and Mexico. Already about 12,100 Cubans entered through Laredo and other Texas border stations in the last three months of 2015, according to official figures. Border officials say as many as 48,000 Cubans could cross here this year, more than all those who came in the last two years combined.

Under the Cuban Adjustment Act, a law Congress passed in 1966 in the early years of enmity with Fidel Castro, any Cuban who sets foot on American soil is given permission to enter, known as parole. Cubans are also eligible for federal welfare benefits including financial assistance for nine months under separate policies from the 1980s. After a year, they can apply for permanent residency, a gateway to citizenship.

The recent exodus from Cuba began in mid-2014, even before President Obama in December of that year announced a restoration of diplomatic relations with the government, now led by Mr. Castro’s brother Raúl. In a major change, President Raúl Castro allowed Cubans to leave the country without exit visas. Many Cubans have said that rumors that the special entry to the United States would be canceled had caused them to pack up and go.

“The rumors are unfounded,” Alan Bersin, assistant secretary of Homeland Security, said in an interview, seeking to dispel the fears. “The Cuban Adjustment Act is still in effect and is part of the overall immigration policy and there is no intent presently to change that.”

Mr. Cuellar has called for the act to be repealed, but he acknowledges there is little prospect that Congress will act this year.

The recent influx is nothing like the chaotic rush of Cubans fleeing the Communist government that overwhelmed South Florida with the Mariel boatlift in 1980, and the rafter crisis in 1994. The federal border authorities, who have been watching the number of Cubans growing steadily, added officers and opened extra rooms in the border station, doubling their capacity to process them. Most Cubans move through in less than an hour, officials said.

Frank Longoria, assistant director of field operations for United States Customs and Border Protection, said that despite their numbers, the Cubans’ entry has not affected the huge flows of people and freight trucks each day through Laredo, the country’s largest land port of entry.

At the border, Cubans are fingerprinted and pass through routine criminal and terrorism background checks. There is no special vetting for Cubans, and there are no medical examinations or vaccination requirements.

“Right now I feel like the freest Cuban in the whole world,” said Rodny Nápoles, 39, a coach of the Cuban national women’s water polo team who crossed into Laredo this week.

This week, the first direct flights from northern Costa Rica to the Mexican city just across the border brought more than 300 Cubans, including at least 41 pregnant women and their families.

One of them, Yadelys Rodríguez Martín, 28, who was 19 weeks pregnant, sat down to rest and enjoy a moment of relief on the front steps of Cubanos en Libertad, right after emerging from the border station. After traveling through Ecuador and being stuck for three months in Costa Rica because of a political dispute in the region, she said she was stunned by how quickly she had been admitted into the United States.

“We are not used to things happening so fast,” Ms. Rodríguez said. More here.

Facts: Mexico to U.S. Immigration

Posted on February 12, 2016February 12, 2016 by Denise Simon

Unaccompanied Alien Children Charged in Execution-Style Murder, Media Calls Them “Baby-Faced Boys”

It appears that the recent execution-style murder of a Massachusetts man was committed by two Central American teens that came to the U.S. as Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) under President Obama’s open border free-for-all. Tens of thousands of illegal immigrant minors—mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras—have entered the country through the Mexican border since the influx began in the summer of 2014 and the administration has relocated them nationwide.

News reports indicate that the 17-year-olds charged in the gruesome Massachusetts killing entered the U.S. recently as UAC’s and both have ties to MS-13, according to authorities cited by various outlets. They lived in Everett and one of the teens, Cristian Nunez-Flores, moved to Massachusetts from his native El Salvador a year and a half ago which is when the influx of Central American minors began. His parents remain in El Salvador, according to a local news article. The other gangbanger’s name is Jose Vasquez Ardon and he too is a recent arrival from Central America. Prosecutors say the teens, described in a local news article as “baby-faced boys,”shot a 19-year-old in the head. Both are being held without bail for obvious reasons. A must read summary here.

*** Meanwhile***

5 facts about Mexico and immigration to the U.S.

PewResearch: Pope Francis is expected to make immigration a major theme of his visit to Mexico. By traveling northward across Mexico, he intends to symbolically retrace the journey of Mexican and Central American migrants traveling to the United States. After the pope leaves Mexico City, his route will begin in the southern state of Chiapas, which shares a long border with Guatemala, and end in Ciudad Juárez, located across the U.S.-Mexico border from El Paso, Texas, a longtime entry point to the U.S.

U.S. immigration from Latin America has shifted over the past two decades. From 1965 to 2015, more than 16 million Mexicans migrated to the U.S. in one of the largest mass migrations in modern history. But over the past decade, Mexican migration to the U.S. has slowed dramatically. Today, Mexico increasingly serves as a land bridge for Central American immigrants traveling to the U.S.

Here are five facts about Mexico and trends in immigration to the U.S.

1Mexico is stopping more unauthorized Central American immigrants at its southern border. The Mexican government said in 2014 that it would increase enforcement at its southern border in response to an increased flow of Central Americans traveling through Mexico to reach the U.S. In 2015, the government there carried out about 150,000 deportations of unauthorized immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, a 44% jump over the previous year. These three Central American countries alone accounted for nearly all (97%) of Mexico’s deportations in 2015.

2Despite increased enforcement by Mexico, many unauthorized Central Americans are still reaching the U.S. via Mexico. At the U.S.-Mexico border, the number of families and unaccompanied children apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials is again rising, though it’s too early to tell how 2016 will compare with prior years. From Oct. 1, 2015, to Jan. 31, 2016, 24,616 families and 20,455 unaccompanied children – the vast majority of them from Central America – were apprehended at the southwestern U.S. border, double the total from the same time period the year before. Apprehensions of unaccompanied children rose to record levels in fiscal 2014, then decreased by 42% in fiscal 2015.

3More Cubans are also traveling through Mexico to reach the U.S. The number of Cubans migrating through Mexico to reach the U.S. spiked dramatically last year after President Barack Obama said the U.S. would renew ties with the island nation. In fiscal 2015, 43,159 Cubans entered the U.S. via ports of entry, a 78% increase over the previous year. Two-thirds of these Cubans arrived through the U.S. Border Patrol’s Laredo Sector in Texas. (Cubans who pass an inspection can enter the U.S. legally under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966.)

4Fewer Mexicans are migrating to the U.S. today than in the past. In fact, more Mexicans left than came to the U.S since the end of the Great Recession. Between 2009 and 2014, 870,000 Mexican nationals left Mexico to come to the U.S., down from the 2.9 million who left Mexico for the U.S. between 1995 and 2000. Of those moving back to Mexico, many cite family as the reason for their return. About 1 million Mexican immigrants and their U.S.-born children moved from the U.S. to Mexico between 2009 and 2014, and 61% said they had done so to reunite with family or to start a family, according to the 2014 Mexican National Survey of Demographic Dynamics.

5More Mexicans now say life is about the same in the U.S. and Mexico. In 2015, 33% of Mexican adults said life in the U.S. is neither better nor worse than life in Mexico, up from 23% who said this in 2007. Still, about half of Mexican adults believe life is better in the U.S. and 35% of Mexicans said they would move to the U.S. if they had the opportunity and means to do so, similar shares as in 2009.

ISIS, Islamic State has a Help Desk

Posted on February 11, 2016February 11, 2016 by Denise Simon

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) uses a 34-page manual to instruct its followers on how to stay invisible on the Internet.

The Arabic document was translated and released this week by analysts at the Combating Terrorism Center, an independent research group at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. It includes warnings to avoid Instagram because it is owned by Facebook, and Dropbox because former secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sits on its board of investors. Famous government leaker Edward Snowden has also criticized Dropbox over its privacy, the document notes.

Users are also directed to use Apple’s encrypted FaceTime and iMessage features over regular unencrypted text and chat features. More here.

New ISIS ‘help desk’ to aid hiding from authorities

TheHill: The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has opened up a new technical “help desk” that instructs terrorists on how to hide from Western authorities, according to researchers.

The Electronic Horizon Foundation (EHF) was launched on Jan. 30 as a joint effort of several of the top ISIS cybersecurity experts, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) said in a new report.

While researchers have previously uncovered an ISIS “help desk” and 34-page manual that help extremists encrypt their communications, MEMRI said the EHF takes these services to an “alarming” new level.

“Jihadis have long sought technical information, which has been confined in the past to various password-protected jihadi forums,” said the MEMRI report, shared exclusively with The Hill. “However, the freedom and ease by which they can now obtain that information is alarming, especially when such information is shared over private and secure channels.”

The EHF operates on the encrypted messaging platform Telegram but also maintains a Twitter account that disseminates information and directs followers to its secure Telegram channel.

The group’s self-stated goal is clear: “Spreading security and technical awareness among the monotheists.”

According to an announcement celebrating the EHF launch, ISIS has spent a year establishing the group with the goal of “unifying the technical and security efforts, and uniting the ranks of the mujahideen’s supporters.”

It brings together several technical support entities, such as the Information Security channel on Telegram and the “Islamic State Technician,” an ISIS security specialist thought to be behind a leading password-protected technical forum.

The announcement, which the MEMRI translated, was also direct that the EHF had been formed “due to the electronic war and tight surveillance imposed by the Western intelligence apparatuses over Internet users, and their tracking and following of the mujahideen and their supporters, and targeting them based on their data and information, which they share over the Internet.”

EHF pledged to provide resources to help combat this surveillance.

“It is time to face the electronic surveillance, educate the mujahideen about the dangers of the Internet, and support them with the tools, directives and security explanations to protect their electronic security, so that they don’t commit security mistakes that can lead to their bombardment and killing,” the announcement said.

As of early this week, the EHF Telegram account had over 2,200 members.

MEMRI said EHF has not posted much yet, “but it is expected to take the lead nonetheless in content posted as time goes by.”

If the group follows in the footsteps of its creators, its content will be “defensively-oriented,” such as tutorials on mobile phone security, instead of “offensively-oriented,” such as instructions on launching cyberattacks, MEMRI said.

In the wake of the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., law enforcement officials have cautioned that potential terrorists are increasingly using encryption to hide from investigators, a phenomenon they call “going dark.”

The warnings have led to some calling for legislation that would guarantee government access to encrypted data, although momentum on Capitol Hill for such a bill has cooled in recent months.

“I don’t think we’re any closer to a consensus on that than we were, I think, six months ago,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, said last week. “Or if there is a consensus, it is that a legislative solution, I think, is very unlikely.”

IS Encryption Guide by AlyssaBereznak