What has Stopped Detention and Deportation

Posted on June 19, 2015June 19, 2015 by Denise Simon

Barack Obama has selectively issued waivers on countless laws, one with real consequences is deportations. Then in August of 2013, the federal court, noted the 9th circuit ruled in a case Rodrigues v. Robbins that long-term detention without due process required immediate bond hearings. As a result, detention and deportations laws and procedures have been turned upside down.

Enforcement? What Enforcement?

by Mark Krikorian

Three recent items highlight the continuing collapse of interior immigration enforcement under Obama.

The first is information pried out of DHS by Senators Grassley and Sessions: One hundred twenty-one convicted criminals who faced deportation orders between 2010 and 2014 were never removed from the country and now face murder charges, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Just to be clear, these were convicted criminals, in ICE custody, who had been ordered deported but were instead released back into U.S. communities, and then went on to murder Americans. Most were released simply because the administration didn’t want to detain them. Only for two dozen does the administration have any excuse at all, saying that they had to be released because their home countries wouldn’t take them back. And even that’s no excuse, for two reasons: the Supreme Court decision Obama’s people point to (Zadvydas v. Davis) limiting open-ended detention beyond six months of any criminal aliens whose countries won’t take them back has significant wiggle room in it – wiggle room the administration refuses, in this one and only instance, to take advantage of.

And second, the law requires the State Department to impose visa sanctions on countries that won’t take their own citizens back, a requirement Secretaries Clinton and Kerry have simply ignored. Some of the blood of these 121 murdered Americans (whose names we don’t know, presumably because ICE is protecting their murders’ privacy rights) is on the hands of this administration, which chose to release the convicted criminal aliens back into the United States rather than keep them in detention.

If that’s not depressing enough, Maria Sachetti at the Boston Globe has done yeoman’s work in uncovering hundreds of immigrant sex criminals whom ICE let go because of the same Supreme Court ruling – without even making sure they were registered with local authorities as sex offenders. Here’s what happened in several instances after their release by ICE: Immigration officials tried to deport Luis-Leyva Vargas, 47, to Cuba after he served three years in a Florida prison for unlawful sex with a teen. In 2008, officials released him. Two years later, he kidnapped an 18-year-old in Rockingham County, Va., at knifepoint and raped her. Now he is serving a 55-year prison sentence. Felix Rodriguez, a 67-year-old sex offender convicted of raping children as young as 4 in the 1990s, was freed in 2009, also because Cuba would not take him back. Months later, he fatally shot his girlfriend in Kansas City. He pleaded guilty and is serving 10 years in a Missouri prison. Andrew Rui Stanley, convicted in 2000 of multiple counts of sodomizing a child when Stanley was 14, was released in 2009 after Brazil failed to provide a passport needed to send him home. For the next two years, he viciously abused three children in St. Louis and now, at age 31, will be in prison for the rest of his life. None of these sickening crimes should have been allowed to occur. An administration that took public safety seriously would find ways to detain criminals until they could be deported, and apply whatever pressure was needed to get their native countries to comply. But this is not that administration. And finally, on a less grisly note, my colleague Jessica Vaughan has uncovered data showing a collapse in worksite enforcement.

In effect, as the Washington Times headline put it, “Obama gives free pass to businesses that hire illegals.” From 2013 to 2015, the number of ICE audits of employer records (to check the work eligibility of employees) dropped 86 percent; arrests of crooked employers dropped 73 percent; and fines collected dropped 51 percent. It seems that once it became clear that Sen. Rubio’s amnesty/immigration-surge bill was not going to reach his desk, Obama called a halt to the (limited) show of worksite enforcement he had ordered up to persuade skeptical Republican House members that he could be trusted to enforce the provisions of Rubio’s amnesty/immigration-surge bill. The fact that he cut back so drastically on enforcement when it was no longer politically useful is proof that such skepticism was warranted.

And finally, as evidence of this administration’s true priorities, USCIS is broadcasting “DACA Renewal Tips” out of a concern that some recipients of Obama’s lawless version of the DREAM Act amnesty may not renew their two-year work permits (presumably to avoid paying the fee, since they that there won’t be any enforcement consequences from reverting to illegal status).

Fleecing of America in Afghanistan Schools

Posted on June 19, 2015June 19, 2015 by Denise Simon

Probes started into potential U.S. spending on “ghost schools” in Afghanistan

Officials in Washington and Kabul are examining whether U.S. funds were spent for schooling in Afghanistan that never occurred

By: The Center for Public Integrity

Nils Kauffman, who served as an education officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Afghanistan, said he noticed irregularities at a vocational training institute the agency was funding during his visits to its campus in downtown Kabul in 2012 and 2013. He recalls being surprised not to see any students in the institute’s laboratories, where volt meters and scientific equipment remained in their original packaging.

Though Kauffman spied students elsewhere, he said he could never get a reliable account of how many were actually enrolled at the school. He also could not verify that the institute had addressed what a 2011 external audit called a host of “deviations” from sound practices, including a lack of accounting software, a cash-based payment system, and $118,000 in spending by the school over a five month period on weapons, international travel, and salary supplements.

Kauffman didn’t have the authority to demand a new, broader audit of the institute, but he reported his concerns to his superiors at USAID. They never acted, he said, and he recalls an official in the agency’s Office of Afghanistan-Pakistan Affairs expressing worry that canceling the institute’s funding would create what the official called “bad press.”

“Every time something came up, they jumped to keep this guy [the institute’s leader] happy, despite the problems, despite the lack of financial transparency,” said Kauffman, who is now a private development consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In fact, USAID continued giving the institute funds, totaling at least $12.3 million through last Sunday, according to USAID spokesman Sam Ostrander.

Kauffman’s experience is only a small part of the controversy suddenly surrounding the long-running U.S. effort to promote the education and training of the largely illiterate population in Afghanistan. More than three-quarters of a billion dollars in U.S. funds have been used to finance the effort, and USAID has repeatedly depicted it as one of its signal accomplishments there.

Last month, Afghanistan’s newly-appointed education minister raised questions about the veracity of that claim when he told his country’s parliament that some aid funds had flowed to so-called “ghost schools, which are only on paper,” according to several Afghan media accounts of the May 27 session. The minister, Assadullah Hanif Balkhi, said that officials in the previous government — in power from 2004 to 2014 — lied about the number of schools to obtain more foreign funds.

“It is a fact that there are no schools in some parts of the country, but all the expenses — including teachers’ salaries — are being paid, and now we will bring reforms to this waste,” Balkhi told the parliament, according to Tolonews, a publisher and broadcaster based in Kabul.

Asked to provide more detail, a spokesman for the ministry, Kabir Haqmal, later told NBC News — the Center for Public Integrity’s publication partner for this article — that the matter is still under investigation. In some cases, he said, schools may have been closed due to fighting while “permanent absentees” were kept on the books for years, following a requirement of Afghan law.

“There could be schools that do not exist, but we [are] assessing all our records and so far have not found any such instances,” Haqmal said. “That does not mean there are no ghost schools, but we just do not have that information yet. We are taking this very seriously and will share our finding with public very soon.”

The new minister’s claims have provoked the top federal auditor for U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, John F. Sopko, to express concern that “U.S. and other donors may have paid for schools that students do not attend and for the salaries of teachers who do not teach.”

In a June 11 letter to acting USAID administrator Alfonso E. Lenhardt, released by Sopko on June 18, Sopko said the allegations about “ghost schools, ghost students, and ghost teachers call for immediate attention,” and asked the agency to explain within two weeks what it is doing to investigate the reliability of its data and the potential misuse of its funds.

Accurate data, Sopko said, “is essential for gauging progress in USAID’s education programs and for making future funding decisions.”

USAID spokesman Ostrander, in an emailed response to questions, said the agency will provide a detailed reply to Sopko by the June 30 deadline. According to a written statement Ostrander provided to the Center for Public Integrity from Larry Sampler, assistant to the USAID administrator for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the agency has already asked the Afghan Education Ministry for more information. USAID currently has a full-time employee assigned to help the ministry improve the reliability of its data, according to Sampler’s statement.

Like all the agency’s projects in Afghanistan, “USAID-implemented education projects adhere to the Agency’s strict practices for monitoring their performance and success,” Sampler wrote.

USAID has repeatedly boasted about its role in raising enrollment rates in Afghanistan, citing Afghanistan Education Ministry data. More than eight million Afghan students were enrolled in 2013, compared to just 900,000 in 2002, according to data that Sopko cited in his most recent quarterly report. He said USAID had acknowledged these figures could not be independently verified, however.

At the Afghanistan Technical Vocational Institute, where Kauffman said he observed irregularities, 4,529 students have so far graduated “with the support of USAID and other sponsors,” Ostrander said. But the institute’s founder and director, Sardar Roshan, reached by cell phone in Kabul, told the Center for Public Integrity that the total number was “close to 7,000.” Ostrander told the Center for Public Integrity he could not explain the discrepancy.

Roshan’s tight connections to Washington

Roshan served as Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan from 1992 to 1994, as the country’s minister of education from 1990 to 1992, and as a “rebel commander” liaising between “anticommunist forces and the U.S. government” in the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan during the 1980’s, according to his Linkedin profile.

Roshan denies that the institute has ever misreported its student population, saying the “ghost schools” are in rural provinces, but that his institute in downtown Kabul “could not fake students even if we wanted to.” He says he is highly proud of the institute. “When I’m in the international airport, when I walk into a bank in Kabul, when I look at the provincial governments, I see my graduates in every corner,” he said.

Rajiv Shah, the administrator of USAID from 2010 until February, singled the vocational institute out for special praise in a July 2013 speech at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington. “Today, we have more than 8 million children in schools with over 30 percent of who are girls. These investments have resulted in over 30,000 young women finishing secondary school and more than 40,000 young women seeking to earn university degrees today,” Shah said. “I’ve had the chance to meet some of these young women on visits to places like the Afghan Vocational Training Institute, watching them come in from around the country to develop marketable skills so they can triple or quadruple their earning potential upon graduation.”

But Kauffman, the former USAID education officer, was not alone in in voicing concerns about the institute’s achievements. In early 2012 – more than a year before Shah’s speech — USAID’s inspector general had reported there was “little evidence” that the agency’s support of the school, known as the Afghanistan Technical Vocational Institute, had strengthened its “overall technical capacity” or empowered Afghan youth. It said the project that included the institute “lacked clearly defined goals, objectives, and priorities.”

The institute began receiving USAID funds in 2007, according to Roshan and Ostrander. The funds were initially for scholarships, and were paid under USAID’s Afghanistan capacity-building program, Roshan said. But the financing was switched to the agency’s education department in 2010, under a subcontract with Education Development Center, Inc., a Massachusetts-based non-profit organization. Students were supposed to be trained in business management, construction, horticulture, information and communication technology, and automotive repair, according to the USAID webpage about the institute.

After the 2011 audit by accounting firm Grant Thornton’s Afghanistan office, USAID staff twice came to inspect the institute. But Kauffman said the institute obstructed efforts by USAID teams to dig deeper into its records, a claim supported by a copy he provided of USAID’s internal report about its site visits in July and August 2011.

The report states that the inspectors were “unable to meet all technical staff, check the systems, or gather sample documentation,” partly because the staff “were instructed by their headquarters not to disclose any documents” to them. It complained that Roshan and his ex-finance officer only met with them for 50 minutes, and said that as a result they were unable to learn whether the Institute had addressed key concerns the audit raised, including many involving its handling and disbursement of donor funds.

One person was, inappropriately, still responsible for handling petty cash, writing checks, and entering financial data into the computer, the report said. And the “most important gap” identified by the auditors — the fact that the institute paid its employees’ salaries in cash rather than traceable bank transfers — was still a problem, the inspectors wrote. Multiple reports by Sopko have described this as a frequent practice in Afghanistan.

Roshan denied making any attempt to obstruct the inspection. He told the Center for Public Integrity that many of these problems were resolved by the institute directly after the audit appeared, though he acknowledged that the institute had continued to use a cash-based payment system until 2013. Ostrander similarly said the institute had made progress since undergoing a separate assessment of its business model.

Roshan sent the Center for Public Integrity a lengthy rebuttal to the Grant Thornton audit, accompanied by documents including templates for payment vouchers, time sheets, a 19-page accounting manual, and its personnel policy. He defended the spending on weapons, saying the institute needed shotguns for the protection of its staff and students. The international travel was for his own visits to the U.S., he said. And the salary supplements were “necessary,” he said, to keep American teachers at the institute.

“I admit shortfalls in the finance/procurement systems,” Roshan told the Center for Public Integrity in an emailed statement, but some were “nothing but symptoms of failure of the counterpart/donor to deliver technical and financial assistance” in a timely and consistent manner.

Roshan said further that the issues raised in the audit stemmed from friction between Education Development Center, Inc. and USAID. Indeed, the agency’s 2012 inspector general report said the two entities had disagreed about “key elements of the design” of the larger educational project that Washington was financing, and said that this had hampered progress. “We were just caught in the tug of war,” Roshan said.

Alison Cohen, a spokeswoman for Education Development Center, Inc., said in an emailed statement that her firm “did as it was required,” and USAID found no mismanagement of its funds “on the part of EDC.” She said the firm is “fully committed to achieving the highest level of compliance” with its contracts, a quality recognized by “dozens of federal agencies, state and local governments, and private organizations” that have given it funds.

Finding various ways to keep the funds flowing

A few months after the USAID site visits, the agency stopped funding the institute through Education Development Center and found what Kauffman described as an alternative path: It modified one of its ongoing funding agreements with the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN Habitat) to add continuing technical and financial support for the institute.

But UN Habitat leaders raised their own concerns about the institute’s accounting and spending practices, informing USAID staff at an April 2012 meeting that Roshan’s salary and benefits package was $17,600 per month, according to a memo five months later from the director of USAID’s Office of Social Sector Development, Carol Horning, to the agency’s Afghanistan mission director. Annual per capita gross national income in Afghanistan was $1,940 that year, according to World Bank data.

Roshan denied he was paid $17,600 but declined to say what his salary was at the time. He said he had salaries that “were not on an Afghanistan scale” because he was an American citizen, and lived in Maryland for periods during the early 2010s. “I singlehandedly created the institute from scratch,” he said. “I was compensated less than half of what I should have received.” Roshan stepped down as the CEO this year, according to both Roshan and Ostrander, but Roshan said he remains the president until its board selects a new one.

The UN Habitat funding method worked for most of 2012, but on November 19, 2012, as it was drawing to a close, Roshan wrote directly to Shah, suggesting that “urgent funding be continued through an appropriate USAID mechanism for a period of time to avoid an abrupt closure” of the institute, according to an email that Roshan provided the Center for Public Integrity.

Shah responded less than four hours later, according to a second email that Roshan provided the Center for Public Integrity, thanking Roshan for his note and sending a copy to USAID’s assistant administrator for Afghanistan and Pakistan “so we could explore this issue and get back to you.” McKenzie Stough, a spokesperson at Georgetown University, where Shah is now a distinguished fellow at the School of Foreign Service, said that she had conveyed a request for comment to Shah’s personal assistant, but no response was forthcoming.

Eleven days after Roshan’s email exchange with Shah, Afghanistan’s then-education minister Farooq Wardak signed a letter to U.S. Ambassador James B. Cunningham — identical in wording to the email that Roshan had sent Shah.

USAID’s Afghanistan mission director at the time, Ken Yamashita, met with Roshan on December 10, 2012, and proposed that USAID continue supporting the institute but disburse the funds as a part of an overall USAID financial support to the Education Ministry, according to an email from USAID official Kerry Pelzman to several colleagues, which was obtained by the Center for Public Integrity. Yamashita, who is now a regional director at the Peace Corps, told the Center for Public Integrity by email that he did not dispute this account.

Twelve days later, Yamashita met with Wardak to seal the deal, according to a December 29, 2012, letter from him to Wardak. In it, Yamashita thanked him for his “receptivity to inclusion of support for ATVI as part of USAID’s on-budget support to the Ministry of Education,” and promised to let Cunningham know that Wardak’s November letter had “borne fruit.” Cunningham, who is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, did not respond to phoned and emailed requests for comment.

Yamashita’s optimism was premature. Funding for the institute did not end up going through the Education Ministry, according to Kauffman, who said he heard the USAID finance department had objected to providing such general support. But in June 2013, USAID began providing another million dollars in direct funding for the institute, good for the next two years, according to the statement it posted on the Web. That funding expired on June 14, 2015.

Ostrander said the direct grant would not be renewed, but said USAID expects to start funding the institute again soon, this time through The Asia Foundation. The funding is meant to improve administrative functions and — subject to compliance with what Ostrander described as “certain requirements and standards” — cover its operating expenses. Ostrander said he could not immediately tell the Center for Public Integrity how much funding would be transmitted to the institute under the new agreement.

Roshan said however that he expects The Asia Foundation funding to net his institute $300,000 over the next six months. Two spokeswomen for The Asia Foundation did not reply to phoned and emailed requests for comment.

There’s “no way” the institute could continue to exist without international support, Kauffman said.

Welfare Use by Immigrant Households with Children

Posted on June 18, 2015June 18, 2015 by Denise Simon

Some studies speak for themselves. This one is chilling. It demonstrates failure, lack of control and management as well as a continued monetary magnet that wont soon or ever go away.

A Look at Cash, Medicaid, Housing, and Food Programs

by: The Center for Immigration Studies

Thirteen years after welfare reform, the share of immigrant-headed households (legal and illegal) with a child (under age 18) using at least one welfare program continues to be very high. This is partly due to the large share of immigrants with low levels of education and their resulting low incomes — not their legal status or an unwillingness to work. The major welfare programs examined in this report include cash assistance, food assistance, Medicaid, and public and subsidized housing.

Among the findings:

In 2009 (based on data collected in 2010), 57 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal and illegal) with children (under 18) used at least one welfare program, compared to 39 percent for native households with children.
Immigrant households’ use of welfare tends to be much higher than natives for food assistance programs and Medicaid. Their use of cash and housing programs tends to be similar to native households.
A large share of the welfare used by immigrant households with children is received on behalf of their U.S.-born children, who are American citizens. But even households with children comprised entirely of immigrants (no U.S.-born children) still had a welfare use rate of 56 percent in 2009.
Immigrant households with children used welfare programs at consistently higher rates than natives, even before the current recession. In 2001, 50 percent of all immigrant households with children used at least one welfare program, compared to 32 percent for natives.
Households with children with the highest welfare use rates are those headed by immigrants from the Dominican Republic (82 percent), Mexico and Guatemala (75 percent), and Ecuador (70 percent). Those with the lowest use rates are from the United Kingdom (7 percent), India (19 percent), Canada (23 percent), and Korea (25 percent).
The states where immigrant households with children have the highest welfare use rates are Arizona (62 percent); Texas, California, and New York (61 percent); Pennsylvania (59 percent); Minnesota and Oregon (56 percent); and Colorado (55 percent).
We estimate that 52 percent of households with children headed by legal immigrants used at least one welfare program in 2009, compared to 71 percent for illegal immigrant households with children. Illegal immigrants generally receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children.
Illegal immigrant households with children primarily use food assistance and Medicaid, making almost no use of cash or housing assistance. In contrast, legal immigrant households tend to have relatively high use rates for every type of program.
High welfare use by immigrant-headed households with children is partly explained by the low education level of many immigrants. Of households headed by an immigrant who has not graduated high school, 80 percent access the welfare system, compared to 25 percent for those headed by an immigrant who has at least a bachelor’s degree.
An unwillingness to work is not the reason immigrant welfare use is high. The vast majority (95 percent) of immigrant households with children had at least one worker in 2009. But their low education levels mean that more than half of these working immigrant households with children still accessed the welfare system during 2009.
If we exclude the primary refugee-sending countries, the share of immigrant households with children using at least one welfare program is still 57 percent.
Welfare use tends to be high for both new arrivals and established residents. In 2009, 60 percent of households with children headed by an immigrant who arrived in 2000 or later used at least one welfare program; for households headed by immigrants who arrived before 2000 it was 55 percent.
For all households (those with and without children), the use rates were 37 percent for households headed by immigrants and 22 percent for those headed by natives.
Although most new legal immigrants are barred from using some welfare for the first five years, this provision has only a modest impact on household use rates because most immigrants have been in the United States for longer than five years; the ban only applies to some programs; some states provide welfare to new immigrants with their own money; by becoming citizens immigrants become eligible for all welfare programs; and perhaps most importantly, the U.S.-born children of immigrants (including those born to illegal immigrants) are automatically awarded American citizenship and are therefore eligible for all welfare programs at birth.
The eight major welfare programs examined in this report are SSI (Supplemental Security Income for low income elderly and disabled), TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), WIC (Women, Infants, and Children food program), free/reduced school lunch, food stamps (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), Medicaid (health insurance for those with low incomes), public housing, and rent subsidies.

Introduction

Concern that immigrants may become a burden on society has been a long-standing issue in the United States. As far back as colonial times there were restrictions on the arrival of people who might become a burden on the community. This report analyzes survey data collected by the Census Bureau from 2002 to 2009 to examine use of welfare programs by immigrant and native households, particularly those with children. The Current Population Survey (CPS) asks respondents about their use of welfare programs in the year prior to the survey,¹ so we are examining self-reported welfare use rates from 2001 to 2009. The findings show that more than half of immigrant-headed households with children use at least one major welfare program, compared to about one-third of native-headed households. The primary reason immigrant households with children tend to have higher overall rates is their much higher use of food assistance programs and Medicaid; use of cash assistance and housing programs tends to be very similar to native households.

Why Study Immigrant Welfare Use?

Use of welfare programs by immigrants is important for two primary reasons. First, it is one measure of their impact on American society. If immigrants have high use rates it could be an indication that they are creating a net fiscal burden for the country. Welfare programs comprise a significant share of federal, and even state, expenditures. Total costs for the programs examined in this study were $517 billion in fiscal year 2008.² Moreover, those who receive welfare tend to pay little or no income tax. If use of welfare programs is considered a problem and if immigrant use of those programs is thought to be high, then it is an indication that immigration or immigrant policy needs to be a adjusted. Immigration policy is concerned with the number of immigrants allowed into the country and the selection criteria used for admission. It is also concerned with the level of resources devoted to controlling illegal immigration. Immigrant policy, on the other hand, is concerned with how we treat immigrants who are legally admitted to the country, such as welfare eligibility, citizenship requirements, and assimilation efforts.

The second reason to examine welfare use is that it can provide insight into how immigrants are doing in the United States. Accessing welfare programs can be seen as an indication that immigrants are having a difficult time in the United States. Or perhaps that some immigrants are assimilating into the welfare system. Thus, welfare use is both a good way of measuring immigration’s impact on American society and immigrants’ adaptation to life in the United States.

Read on if you dare by clicking here.

Obama and DHS Fully Compromised our Security

Posted on June 16, 2015June 16, 2015 by Denise Simon

Getting into America just got easier….

Easier? Yes and while no one is talking about it but I got a tip from an insider. Did you hear the announcement by Jeh Johnson? This program already exists.

It might be a lot easier – and faster – for international travelers to fly into the United States soon.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Friday it will seek approval to put pre-clearance centers at 10 airports in nine foreign countries.

If negotiations are successful, those centers will allow travelers to go through U.S. Customs and Border Protection clearance before they get on their airplane headed to the United States. Once landed, they would not have to be rescreened.

Here’s what Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in the DHS announcement:

“A significant homeland security priority of mine is building more preclearance capacity at airports overseas. We have this now in 15 airports. I am pleased that we are seeking negotiations with 10 new airports in nine countries.

“I want to take every opportunity we have to push our homeland security out beyond our borders so that we are not defending the homeland from the one-yard line. Preclearance is a win-win for the traveling public. It provides aviation and homeland security, and it reduces wait times upon arrival at the busiest U.S. airports.”

The U.S. will enter talks with officials in Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the United Kingdom in Europe, as well as Japan and the Dominican Republic.

The 10 airports would be Brussels Airport, Belgium; Punta Cana Airport, Dominican Republic; Narita International Airport, Japan; Amsterdam Airport Schipol, Netherlands; Oslo Airport, Norway; Madrid-Barajas Airport, Spain; Stockholm Arlanda Airport, Sweden; Istanbul Ataturk Airport, Turkey; and London Heathrow Airport and Manchester Airport in the United Kingdom.

“These countries represent some of the busiest last points of departure to the United States – in 2014, nearly 20 million passengers traveled from these ten airports to the U.S.,” DHS said.

For travelers to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, the pre-clearance would be available on flights from London Heathrow (American Airlines and British Airways); Amsterdam (KLM Royal Dutch Airlines); Tokyo Narita (American); Madrid-Barajas (American); and Punta Cana (Sun Country Airlines).

Officials from trade group Airlines for American and from American and JetBlue Airways quickly praised the DHS effort.

“U.S. airlines drive $1.5 trillion in economic activity, and by improving the passenger experience for visitors or those returning to the United States, while improving security, we can build on that,” A4A President and chief executive Nick Calio said. “The addition of these pre-clearance airports will help increase safety and security while improving the passenger experience with shorter wait times and quicker connections on arrival in the U.S.”

“Expanding air preclearance is a tremendous step forward for improving the overall travel experience for our customers and welcoming more visitors to the United States,” AA chief operating officer Robert Isom said. “Preclearance eases the congestion at our U.S. gateway airports and ensures our customers get to their destinations faster.”

In addition to the three airports served by American from its D/FW hub, the pre-clearance centers would go to four other airports served by American out of other U.S. airports – Manchester, Amsterdam, Punta Cana and Brussels.

JetBlue passengers would benefit from the Punta Cana pre-clearance center.

“We believe that in addition to the need for an increase in CBP staffing at key U.S. gateway airports, more preclearance facilities like the ones being proposed around the globe are an important tool to enhance our nation’s security and reduce the number of travelers clearing Customs stateside — and that ultimately reduces wait times for travelers on all airlines,” JetBlue president and CEO Robin Hayes said.

United also thanked DHS for the proposal.

“We have worked closely with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and support developments that provide more convenience for our customers,” the carrier said in a statement. “We thank Secretary Johnson and his team at the Department of Homeland Security and CBP for their engagement with United and the airline industry, and we look forward to partnering with them on this initiative to facilitate travel and reduce wait times.”

U.S. Travel Association president Roger Dow issued this statement:

“When the experience for the international traveler improves, the U.S. economy improves, and again this administration deserves praise for pressing ahead with innovative policies that simultaneously bolster national security and streamline the customs entry process.

“Customs preclearance is a program that has proven itself effective, and extending it to these key travel markets will undoubtedly boost visitation. As a bonus, adding preclearance facilities will further relieve pressure on the customs entry process here on our shores, improving the system generally.

“Evolving policies such as these are a big reason why we surpassed a record 74 million international visitors to the U.S. last year, and are well on pace to reach 100 million visitors annually by 2021. With overseas visitors spending an average of $4,300 per person, per trip, that’s just good economic sense.”

Customs and Border Protection currently staffs 15 centers in six countries: Dublin and Shannon in Ireland; Aruba; Freeport and Nassau in the Bahamas; Bermuda; Calgary, Toronto, Edmonton, Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver and Winnipeg in Canada; and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

This is a ‘preclearance system’. Please read the full description here.

In 2013, there was a Customs and Border Patrol hearing on this matter in the House of Representatives. Essentially, we cant control security within our borders now we are extending them globally and relying on foreign governments and security services? That did not work out at all in Benghazi. Here is the testimony and it is a must read.

ISIS New Mansion for Their Headquarters

Posted on June 15, 2015June 15, 2015 by Denise Simon

WASHINGTON — An internal State Department assessment paints a dismal picture of the efforts by the Obama administration and its foreign allies to combat the Islamic State’s message machine, portraying a fractured coalition that cannot get its own message straight.

The assessment comes months after the State Department signaled that it was planning to energize its social media campaign against the militant group. It concludes, however, that the Islamic State’s violent narrative — promulgated through thousands of messages each day — has effectively “trumped” the efforts of some of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations.

It also casts an unflattering light on internal discussions between American officials and some of their closest allies in the military campaign against the militants. A “messaging working group” of officials from the United States, Britain and the United Arab Emirates, the memo says, “has not really come together.” More here.

Islamic State leaders claim to be living in luxury in a vast mansion seized from a billionaire Arab sheikh.

The jihadi group’s social media sites posted photographs of the spectacular mansion, under the headline: ‘A castle for the tyrants of Qatar in Palmyra’.

The sprawling hilltop mansion is similar in style to the soon-to-be London home of the current emir, who was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst.

Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, 55, one of the three wives of Qatar’s former emir Sheikh Haman bin Khalifa Al Thani, bought three prime properties in London’s Regent’s Park for an estimated £120million in 2013.

Once completed, the 13-bedroom palace will be the London home of Sheikh Hamad’s son, the 35-year-old Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad.

It is expected to be the most valuable residential property in London in private hands, with estimates claiming it will be worth about £280million.

It will also be the first residential property in the UK to break the £200million mark.

The family also own the Shard – the tallest skyscraper in Europe, Harrods and the Olympic Village.

In recent years, Qataris are thought to have bought almost one in 30 homes in London worth more than £2million.

Photo essay of the mansion is here.

The Fourth Reich, the essay of 2015 on Islamic State.

In a hard-hitting essay on ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) for The Daily Mail, the 2001 Nobel Prize winning author, V.S. Naipaul, wrote: “ISIS could very credibly abandon the label of Caliphate and call itself the Fourth Reich.” Among the writings on Islam and Muslims in recent years, Naipaul’s, as in the books Among the Believers and Beyond Belief, have been perhaps the most incisive and penetrating in exploring the extremist politics of the global Islamist movement from inside of the Muslim world. And that ISIS on a rampage, as Naipaul observed, revived “religious dogmas and deadly rivalries between Sunnis and Shi’as, Sunnis and Jews and Christians is a giant step into darkness.”

Ever since the relatively obscure Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi stepped forth on the pulpit of the Great Mosque in Mosul, Iraq, on June 28, 2014 to announce the rebirth of the Caliphate (abolished in 1924 by the Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk), with al-Baghdadi himself assuming the title of Caliph Ibrahim, the ruling head of the ummah, or worldwide community of Muslims, many might agree with Naipaul, despite the hyperbole — he has left out a potentially nuclear Iran — that “ISIS has to be seen as the most potent threat to the world since the Third Reich.”

It is baffling to read about or watch the sweep of terror spawned by ISIS in the name of Islam — a world religion with a following approaching two billion Muslims. It is insufficient merely to point out that the barbarism of ISIS reflects its origins in the fetid swamps of the Sunni Muslim insurgency of post-Saddam Iraq. But ISIS is neither a new presence in the Arab-Muslim history, nor is the response to it by Western powers, primarily Britain and the United States, given their relationship with the Middle East over the past century.

We have seen ISISes before, and not as al-Qaeda’s second coming.

The first successful appearance of an ISIS in modern times was the whirlwind with which the Bedouin warriors of Abdulaziz ibn Saud (1876-1953) emerged from the interior of the Arabian Desert in 1902 to take hold of the main fortress in Riyadh, the local capital of the surrounding region known as Najd. Some twenty-four years later, this desert warrior-chief and his armies of Bedouin raiders defeated the ruling Sharifian house in the coastal province of Hejaz, where lie Islam’s two holy cities, Mecca and Medina. The full detailed summary and essay is here.