Pakistan sentences Americans on terrorism charges

From Reuters

June 24, 2010

A Pakistani court on Thursday sentenced five American students accused of contacting militants in Pakistan over the Internet and plotting terrorist attacks to 10 years each in prison, the deputy prosecutor said.

The students, in their 20s, were detained in December in Pakistan's central city of Sargodha, 120 miles southeast of Islamabad.

Deputy Prosecutor Rana Bakhtiar said the men were convicted on two counts each, with one carrying a 10-year sentence and the other carrying five years, to be served concurrently. They were also fined a total of 70,000 rupees ($821).

"Both these sentences will begin concurrently and in practice they will spend 10 years in jail. We will appeal in the high court to enhance the sentence," Bakhtiar told reporters.

The five men told the court earlier that they only wanted to provide fellow Muslim brothers in Afghanistan with medicine and financial help, and accused the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Pakistani police of torturing them and trying to frame them.

Two of the five are of Pakistani origin. The others are from Egyptian, Yemeni and Eritrean origins.

The students were arrested days after arriving in Pakistan last year.

Pakistani police said emails showed they contacted militants, who had planned to use them for attacks in Pakistan.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fgw-pakistan-americans-sentenced-20100625,0,2876498,print.story

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State warns whooping cough epidemic could be worst in 50 years

California's top health official warned Wednesday the state is on pace to record the highest number of whooping cough cases in half a century.

“Whooping cough is now an epidemic in California,” said Dr. Mark Horton, director of the California Department of Public Health.

Reported cases of whooping cough, also known as pertussis, have quadrupled since last year, he said.

There have been 910 confirmed cases of the disease in California this year between Jan. 1 and June 15. That is four times as many cases as during the same period last year, when 219 cases were confirmed.

Another 600 possible cases of whooping cough are being investigated by local health departments, Horton said.

The illness can cause adults to experience severe spasms of coughing that if left untreated can continue for three or four months.

He called for children to be vaccinated against the disease and said parents and infant caregivers should get booster shots.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/06/state-warns-that-whooping-cough-epidemic-could-be-worst-in-50-years.html#more

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L.A., the city of refuge for torture survivors

The Program for Torture Victims marks its 30th anniversary this year as the only center in Greater Los Angeles offering medical, psychological and legal services to victims of state-sponsored torture.

by Harold Meyerson

June 24, 2010

In July 1947, the greatest play ever to have its premiere in Los Angeles opened at the Coronet Theatre on La Cienega Boulevard: Bertolt Brecht's " Galileo." The play, with Charles Laughton in the title role, dramatized the great scientist's running battle with the Roman Catholic Church over his telescopic discovery that the Earth orbited the sun rather than the other way around.

At the climax of the play, Galileo — threatened with torture by his inquisitors, who fear that the church's cosmology and authority will be destroyed by Galileo's revelations — recants. His students reel at the news. "Unhappy the land that has no heroes," says one. At which point, Galileo — "completely altered by his trial, almost to the point of being unrecognizable," writes Brecht — enters. "Unhappy the land," he replies, "that is in need of heroes."

Brecht was no stranger to unhappy lands in which heroic, prosaic or even inadvertent acts of defiance came at the price of torture, death or both. Like so many artists from Germany and elsewhere in Europe — Thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Jean Renoir and hundreds more — Brecht had fled the Nazis to live and work in Los Angeles.

Then as now, Los Angeles was the port of entry — and more than that, the new home, the city of second chances — for refugees from regimes that would have tortured and killed them for their beliefs, their ethnicity, their sexuality, their faith or their lack of faith. Which is why "Galileo," by a German playwright and set in 17th century Italy, speaks to and for the Los Angeles that is a great city of immigrants, refugees and seekers of asylum. It spoke to that city in 1947. It speaks to that city today.

Los Angeles is home to more torture survivors than any other U.S. city. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, some 18% of asylum applicants in the United States from 2002 to 2008 had their cases adjudicated in Los Angeles-area federal immigration courts — 71,767 in all. Up to 35% of the asylum seekers, according to estimates from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, are victims of state-sponsored torture. They come here because they are fleeing for their lives, because they live in agony and fear that will not abate if they stay where they are. They come here because Los Angeles has a history of taking people in and helping them rebuild their lives. But simply by virtue of the reason they are coming, they do not come here in good shape. Like Brecht's Galileo, many of them have been "completely altered" by their experiences.

The Program for Torture Victims, which marks its 30th anniversary this year as the only center in Greater Los Angeles offering medical, psychological and legal services to victims of state-sponsored torture, calculates that 71% of its clients suffer from chronic pain and 96% from major depression. Unfortunately, torture survivors are often among the Angelenos least able to afford treatment: Fully 85% of the program's patients have no medical insurance, and 62% are unemployed.

Founded in 1980 by two asylum-seekers — Jose Quiroga, a physician who'd been beaten and detained by the troops who overthrew the government of Chilean President Salvador Allende, and Ana Deutsch, a psychoanalyst whose family had been threatened with arrest by the then-military government of Argentina — the Program for Torture Victims has helped thousands of torture survivors piece together their shattered lives. One such survivor is Kyaw Atey Oo, who was imprisoned and tortured by the Burmese junta before escaping, ultimately, to Los Angeles, where, with the program's help, he put his life together. Today, he is a new U.S. citizen and an agriculture inspector for L.A. County. Rossana Perez, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1983 with nothing but the trauma she had experienced after being beaten and raped by Salvadoran death squads, turned her life around with the program's help as well. Perez co-founded El Rescate, a community health center for immigrants and refugees.

On Friday, the day before the United Nations' International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the Los Angeles City Council will salute the Program for Torture Victims. By so doing, it will also affirm L.A.'s historic role as a city of refuge, at a time when the current anti-immigrant hysteria makes a mockery of the United States' reputation as a nation of refuge. Even when the nation has lost its way, Los Angeles has continued — and must continue — not just to house but to heal the survivors who have come here, as they have always come here, for the haven it offers from unhappy lands.

Harold Meyerson is the editor-at-large of the American Prospect and an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-meyerson-torture-20100624,0,356593,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Sexual Assaults Add to Miseries of Haiti's Ruins

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The 22-year-old woman, wearing a gauzy blue dress that she had changed into after her release, spoke in a whispery voice.

Perhaps the worst part of the whole ordeal, she said, was the place where her kidnappers had chosen to imprison her. That they abducted her was terrifying. That they raped her, repeatedly, was too horrendous to absorb just yet.

But stashing her in the ruins of a home? Making her crawl on her stomach beneath a collapsed slab into a destroyed house where they hid her in a pocket of rubble? That was torture, she said.

“Since I had not slept under any roof since the earthquake, I was so scared I could not breathe,” said the woman, Rose, who requested that her full name be withheld.

Rose's kidnappers told her brother-in-law, who delivered the ransom of about $2,000, that they would kill her if she talked. She had no intention of doing so. But police investigators showed up at the family house in the Delmas 33 neighborhood shortly after her release, and a reporter from The New York Times happened upon the scene, later accompanying Rose to a women's health clinic at the family's request.

Being present when Rose and her family were grappling with the horror of her ordeal offered a firsthand glimpse inside the vulnerability that many Haitians, and particularly women, feel right now. Sleeping in camps, on the street and in yards, many feel themselves at the mercy not only of the elements but of those who prey on others' misery.

So many cases of rape go unrecorded here that statistics tell only a piece of the story. But existing numbers, from the police or women's groups, indicate that violence against women has escalated in the months after the Jan. 12 earthquake . Kidnappings are rare, but they, too, have increased, and “the threat is constant,” said Antoine Lerbours, a spokesman for the Haitian National Police.

Malya Villard, director of Kofaviv, a grass-roots organization that supports rape victims, said that the presence of thousands of prisoners who escaped during the earthquake aggravated an environment where insecurity and despair feed on each other.

“It's an ideal climate for rape,” she said.

Ms. Villard said that Kofaviv's two dozen case workers, in Port-au-Prince, had counseled 264 victims since the earthquake, triple the number in an equivalent period last year. Arrests for rape are fewer — 169 countrywide through May, but more arrests have been made in the last few months than during the same period last year.

Since the earthquake, international relief groups have expressed concerns about violence against women, especially in the camps under their watch. Poor or nonexistent lighting, unlockable latrines, adjacent men's and women's showers and inadequate police protection have all been problems.

Recently, security in eight big camps has improved, with joint Haitian- United Nations police posts or patrols; about 100 Bangladeshi policewomen arrived late last month to deal with gender-based violence at three of them. But there are about 1,200 encampments throughout Haiti , and this city's battered neighborhoods are largely left to their own defenses, too.

Rose and her relatives recently moved back to their properties when the owner of the property where they were squatting threatened the tent city residents with eviction. Their homes have been marked with a yellow stamp by surveyors, meaning they are damaged but fixable. Rose and her relatives sleep outside them, fitfully. They were scared of the “young thugs in Mafia sunglasses,” Rose's cousin said, even before Rose's abduction.

On May 10, Rose, a statuesque woman who is learning to be a beautician, went out to buy some cookies. A police officer whom she knew beckoned her to sit in his unmarked car, she said. She did. Then two men ordered the officer out of the car, taking his gun and driving off with Rose.

The men shoved her into the back, and made her lie face down. She does not know what neighborhood they took her to; it was empty and rubble-filled, and had many destroyed houses. When she protested entering one, they slapped her, she said, and forced her to squeeze through the collapsed entrance. They pushed her into a crawl space beneath a fallen ceiling.

“I was scared mute,” she said. “Only when they raped me did I scream. It hurt.”

Clutching her pelvis as she talked, Rose said that the men had taken turns, raping her seven times. “Or maybe eight,” she said, shutting her eyes.

The police officer showed up at Rose's house the morning after she was kidnapped to tell the family what had happened. “He waited all night while we lay awake terrified,” her brother-in-law said. “He was looking for his car. We said, ‘What about Rose?' He said, ‘We'll look for her, but, you know, you will hear from them first.' ”

The kidnappers used Rose's cellphone to call. They put it on speaker phone and hit her repeatedly so her family could listen to her cry out in pain.

“They demanded $50,000 American,” her uncle, a vendor, said. “That's crazy. I don't have 10 gourdes to my name. But they said, ‘Don't bother going to a voodoo priest. He can't help you. Don't bother calling Obama. He can't help you, either. Just give us money, or we will kill the girl.' ”

Over the next few days, the family managed to raise $2,000 in gourdes, the Haitian currency, from neighbors. The money was left at a drop site on Sunday evening. At 3 a.m. Monday, Rose was blindfolded and put on the back of a mototaxi. When she arrived home, she collapsed into a fetal position at the door to her house and knocked weakly.

Several hours later, the police investigators arrived. Family members encircled Rose as she answered questions in a monotone. Occasionally they peered out at the street through the cracks in their home, fearful that the kidnappers were watching.

Rose had already changed her clothes and bathed, which she did not know would frustrate the collection of evidence. But the police did not raise the issue, anyway, her family said.

When the police left, Rose rode in the back of a car to a Doctors Without Borders clinic, wincing in pain as it bumped over rutted roads. At the tented clinic, she was instructed to take a seat on a bench. Another woman, slim and poised, entered the open-air waiting room and told a nurse she needed to see a gynecologist.

“Infection?” the nurse asked. “A case of rape,” the young woman answered, in clipped French. She had been invited to a “literary circle” in a tent city the previous evening, she said. “No books were discussed,” she said. The two victims sat side by side and stared straight ahead. The nurse said that the clinic had treated about 60 victims in May.

When Rose was called into an examining tent, she stumbled, woozy from hunger. The nurse gave her a couple of packages of crackers. Rose said, “I don't have any money for those.” The nurse told her they were free. Rose offered one of the packages to a Times reporter, who declined and left her to be examined privately.

Rose was discharged with an armful of condoms and pill boxes: antibiotics for sexually transmitted diseases, anti-H.I.V. treatment, pills for vaginitis and over-the-counter painkillers.

As she emerged, her uncle — whom Rose calls Papa — watched her from a distance, tears streaming down his face.

“Beautiful child, oh beautiful child,” he said. “Look into my eyes and you will know how I feel. When is this all going to end? Haven't we suffered enough?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/world/americas/24haiti.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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The Last Firing Squad

Around midnight last Friday the shoeless prisoner was roused from a nap and strapped into a chair. The guards put a patch over his heart, the firing squad's target from 25 feet. Any last words?

“I do not. No.”

With that, a black hood was placed over the bald head of the condemned man, and the countdown began: five, four, three, two, one. Each of the five gunmen squeezed off a shot from a .30 caliber rifle, though one was firing a blank. At once, four bullets entered the chest of Ronnie Lee Gardner. His fist clenched. The fist opened. A few minutes later, his pulse was checked. The deed was done: the state of Utah had killed the killer.

Outside the prison walls, Gardner's family played “Free Bird” on the car stereo. Members of other families, those who had lost loved ones to Gardner's rage, felt some relief. At long last, he's gone, nearly a quarter-century after he was first sentenced to die.

Nate Carlisle was one of the witnesses. A reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune, he stayed up all night, thinking about what he saw and what to say, how to record this moment in history — maybe the last firing squad execution in the United States. A day later, he took off for Zion National Park.

“I needed a couple of days to chill out,” he said. He stopped for gas in a tiny town deep in the canyon country of the Southwest, and there he bumped into the counselor who had helped him prepare to see the state kill a man. Pure coincidence. She asked him how he was doing. Fine, fine, he told her.

“I was never eager to watch a firing squad execution,” he said when I caught up with him. “I did it out of a sense of professional duty. I volunteered. But I'm glad it's over. I would never want to go through it again.”

In Utah, death by firing squad dates to the Mormon Church tradition of blood atonement: you take a life, and the only way to redeem your own is to have blood spilled in a similar way. It's since been outlawed, but Gardner's chosen method of execution pre-dated the change.

The most famous man to be shot by firing squad in the American West was John D. Lee, one of those grim-faced pioneer polygamists whose names are known to students of Mormonism. Lee was sacrificed, he felt, for the church's complicity in the 1857 slaughter of non-Mormon settlers — the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre. He went down defiant, and his last words were classic.

“Center my heart, boys,” he said. “Don't mangle my body.”

Ronnie Lee Gardner was no martyr, no wronged man. His life was trouble and pain from the beginning. Drug and alcohol abuse. Random violence. Robberies, and two murders of people who had the misfortune to get in his way.

“He believes he needs to pay for what he's done,” the killer's daughter, Brandie Gardner, told reporters before the execution. “But at the same time, people should know that what they're doing is murder.”

That's really the heart of this debate, and always has been: is it murder for society to take a life? But the firing squad raises another issue, one the witnesses of the execution last Friday are trying to grapple with: since this is state-sanctioned killing, shouldn't we all be required to participate in some small way, like voting? When a democracy takes a life, it should be there for all to see — transparency, that favorite good government word.

I asked Nate Carlisle if the state should have televised the killing, a C-Span-style record of the execution. “I'll say yes,” said Carlisle. “It should be available to the public.”

For another witness, Marcos Ortiz, a reporter for ABC 4 in Salt Lake City, the killing of Ronnie Lee Gardner was the second execution he has seen. In 1999, he watched a lethal injection death by the state. These killings should not be televised, he said in response to my question.

“This is justice,” he said. “Not entertainment.”

In 1993, I went to the state penitentiary in Walla Walla to be a journalistic witness to a hanging. The occasion was newsworthy because Washington State was about to stage the first execution by the rope in the United States in 28 years. As I drove through a snowstorm at night to reach the prison, I thought about what a rotten human being the doomed man was. Even the most mush-hearted liberal would have trouble working up sympathy for Westley Allan Dodd, who had pleaded guilty to killing three small boys, after raping and mutilating them.

As we reporters gathered in a small room inside the prison, I thought about seeing the trap door open, and Dodd's wretched figure hanging from a noose. The prison conducted a lottery to decide who was going to see Dodd hang. When my name was not called, I felt — for an instant — some disappointment.

But as time went on, I considered myself lucky that I never saw the execution. Driving home the next day, all I could think of was that scene from Clint Eastwood's brilliant “Unforgiven,” the 1992 film that strips away a century of gauzy Western mythology. In the scene, the arrogant kid is drinking whiskey with Eastwood after shooting a man for the first time. He had romanticized gun-slinging; he thought it would be great to blow away some bad guys. Having finally killed someone, the kid is distraught, in tears.

“It's a helluva thing, killing a man,” Eastwood says. “You take away all he's got. And all he's ever gonna have.”

“Well, I guess they had it coming,” the younger gunman says.

“We all have it coming, kid.”

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/the-last-firing-squad/?pagemode=print

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From the White House

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On a Path to Ending Homelessness

EDITOR'S NOTE: In case you missed it, check out Secretary Donovan's post on HUD's blog following yesterday's release of the federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness.

Someone once told me -- in your head it's a dream, but on paper it's a plan.  As a nation, we've talked about addressing the issue of homelessness, and now we have a plan.  Over the last year, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH), consisting of 19 federal agencies and chaired by Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan, drafted the nation's first comprehensive strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness.

The impetus for such a plan was simple.  In the United States, no one should spend a single night without a place to call home.  Yet, 634,000 people, including 107,000 veterans, experience homelessness on any given night.  The families and individuals that experience homelessness and the advocates that work so hard on this issue know that we need to act with a renewed sense of urgency.

Yesterday, the lead Cabinet secretaries from USICH – Secretary Donovan, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Veterans Affairs (VA) Secretary Eric Shinseki – joined USICH Director Barbara Poppe to unveil and submit Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness to the President and Congress. 

The plan sets ambitious but measurable goals: (1) end chronic homelessness in five years; (2) prevent and end homelessness among veterans in five years; (3) prevent and end homelessness for families, youth, and children within a decade; and (4) put us on a path to ending all types of homelessness.

The plan builds on existing interagency partnerships and evidence-based models that are working at the local level.  It will focus the resources and efforts of federal agencies to offer a variety of comprehensive solutions.  For example, the partnership between HUD, HHS, and Education will provide homeless families with not only a home, but the wrap-around services they need to remain off the streets.

This is doable but it requires all of us to work together - Congress, federal agencies, state and local officials, faith-based and community organizations, and business and philanthropic leaders across our country.

We applaud the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness for their tireless efforts to put on paper what we know is possible.  Preventing and ending homelessness will positively impact the lives of individuals and families, veterans, children and youth, those who are chronically ill, those suffering from domestic violence, and those combating discrimination of all sorts.

We look forward to working with dedicated state and local leaders to open doors and opportunities for men, women, and children all across the country.

Melody Barnes is the Director of the Domestic Policy Council

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/06/23/a-path-ending-homelessness

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From the Department of Homeland Security

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Readout of Secretary Napolitano's Remarks on Border Security and Law Enforcement at the Center for Strategic and International Studies

Release Date: June 23, 2010

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact: 202-282-8010

Washington, D.C.—Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano today delivered remarks about the Department's ongoing efforts—and announced new steps—to bolster security along the Southwest border.

"Over the past 18 months, this administration has devoted more resources—including manpower, technology and infrastructure—to the Southwest border than at any point in America's history," said Secretary Napolitano. "We are committed to further bolstering our cooperation with our state, local and tribal law enforcement partners as we continue to implement strong, smart and effective enforcement strategies along our borders and throughout the nation."

In her remarks, Secretary Napolitano reiterated the administration's continued commitment to building on these successes and addressing current challenges with our federal, state, local, tribal and Mexican partners in order to keep our communities safe from threats of border-related violence and crime.

Secretary Napolitano also announced a series of new, common-sense steps to support law enforcement efforts throughout the country—beginning with a new partnership between DHS and the Major Cities Chiefs Association to create a "Southwest Border Law Enforcement Compact" that will enable non-border states and local law enforcement agencies to detail officers to state and local law enforcement agencies along the Southwest border.

Additional measures announced today include new partnerships with state and local law enforcement; expanded information sharing capabilities among law enforcement partners; enhanced technology and targeting to crack down on smuggling; additional tools to enforce our immigration laws while prioritizing the arrest and removal of dangerous criminal aliens; and increased cooperation with Mexico—already at unprecedented levels.

A fact sheet on the new measures as well as successes in the past 18 months can be found here .

Secretary Napolitano also highlighted President Obama's recent request for $500 million in supplemental funds to bolster law enforcement efforts at the Southwest border, and his decision to deploy an additional 1,200 National Guard troops to assist the ongoing efforts to secure the border and combat drug cartels.

For more information, visit www.dhs.gov .

http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1277311620062.shtm

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Fact Sheet: Southwest Border Next Steps

June 23, 2010

Office of the Press Secretary
Contact: 202-282-8010

Washington, D.C.—Over the past year and a half, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), working with its federal, state, local, tribal and Mexican partners, has made significant progress in cracking down on border-related crime and smuggling while facilitating legitimate travel and commerce.

The Administration is committed to building on these successes and addressing current challenges with our partners in order to keep our communities safe from threats of border-related violence and crime. To that end, the Department is implementing the following initiatives to strengthen and expand upon existing, successful efforts.

These initiatives come in addition to President Obama's request for $500 million in supplemental funds for enhanced border security and law enforcement activities, and his deployment of up to an additional 1,200 National Guard troops to assist the ongoing efforts to secure the border and combat cartel violence.

New Measures to Enhance the Security of America's Border Communities

The following initiatives will be budget-neutral.

Creating New Partnerships with State & Local Law Enforcement

• DHS is forging a new partnership with the Major Cities Chiefs Association to create the "Southwest Border Law Enforcement Compact"—designed to boost law enforcement at the border by enabling non-border state and local law enforcement agencies to detail officers to state and local law enforcement agencies along the Southwest border.

Building Information Sharing Capabilities Among All Law Enforcement Partners

• DHS is working with the Department of Justice (DOJ) to create a new system that will fully link the information systems of all state, local and tribal law enforcement entities operating along the Southwest border with those of DHS and DOJ.
  
  
• DHS is strengthening the analytic capability of fusion centers across the Southwest border to receive and share threat information, improving our ability to identify and mitigate emerging threats.
  
  
• DHS is establishing a suspicious activities reporting program for the Southwest border. This will help local officers recognize and track incidents related to criminal activity by drug traffickers and utilize this information for targeted law enforcement operations on both sides of the border.

Enhancing Technology and Targeting to Crack Down on Smuggling and Border Crime

• DHS will deploy additional Border Patrol agents, ICE investigators, air assets and other technologies to the Arizona border to conduct targeted operations against the cartels that exploit the Tucson Sector border region.
  
  
• DHS and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) are partnering to develop and implement Project Roadrunner, an integrated license plate reader recognition (LPR) system. Project Roadrunner was conceived to target both north- and southbound drug trafficking and associated illegal activity along the Southwest border. Under this partnership, ONDCP will provide DHS with previously-purchased fixed and mobile cameras—expanding DHS' existing capabilities at minimal cost. This effort is ongoing and will expand as legal and logistical issues are resolved.
  
  
• DHS is expanding the Department's Illegal Drug Program to four additional Southwest border ports of entry—for a total of six locations—to target drug traffickers whose trafficking activity can be tied to Mexico and return them to Mexico to face prosecution by Mexican authorities.
  
  
• CBP has obtained an approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for a Certificate of Authorization (COA) that will allow CBP Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) flights to operate along the Texas border and throughout the Gulf Coast region. CBP will base a UAS at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, Texas, as soon as all necessary agreements and resources are finalized to sustain a permanent UAS presence there.

Prioritizing the Arrest and Removal of Dangerous Criminal Aliens

• Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is expanding the Joint Criminal Alien Removal Task Forces by nine officers forming two additional teams. These task forces are comprised of ICE officers and local law enforcement agents who work together to identify and arrest convicted criminal aliens in our communities.
  
  
• ICE is deploying 40 officers to work with state and local jails that are within 100 miles of the Southwest border to ensure the identification of all removable convicted criminal aliens detained in those jails who, if released, would pose a danger to public safety.

Expanding Unprecedented Law Enforcement Partnerships with Mexico

• The Department is increasing joint training programs with Mexican law enforcement agencies—focusing on money laundering investigations and cracking down on human trafficking and exploitation.

Ongoing Initiatives to Secure the Southwest Border

Over the past year and a half, the Department has launched unprecedented security initiatives designed to provide additional manpower, technology and infrastructure to high-risk Southwest border regions; coordinate more closely with our federal, state and local law enforcement partners; and forge new cooperative arrangements with Mexican law enforcement authorities that bolster security on both sides of the border.

Surging Additional Manpower, Technology and Infrastructure to the Border

• The Border Patrol is better staffed than at any time in its 85-year history, having nearly doubled the number of agents from approximately 10,000 in 2004 to more than 20,000 today.
  
  
• DHS has doubled the number of personnel assigned to Southwest Border Enforcement Security Task Forces; tripled the number of ICE intelligence analysts working along the U.S.-Mexico border; quadrupled deployments of Border Liaison Officers; and begun screening 100 percent of southbound rail shipments for illegal weapons, drugs and cash—for the first time ever.
  
  
• DHS has deployed additional canine teams trained to detect drugs and weapons, as well as non-intrusive inspection technology to identify anomalies in passenger vehicles that may indicate the presence of drugs, weapons, or other contraband, to the Southwest border.
  
  
• The 652 miles of border fencing mandated by Congress is nearly complete—and DHS expects to complete the remaining six miles by the end of the year.

Building New Partnerships with State, Local and Mexican Law Enforcement

• The federal government has worked closely with state and local law enforcement along the border—leveraging the resources and capabilities of over 50 law enforcement agencies to crack down on transnational criminal organizations.
  
  
• DHS has increased the funds state and local law enforcement can use to combat border-related crime through Operation Stonegarden—a Department of Homeland Security funded grant program designed to enhance border security by developing multilateral enforcement efforts between the U.S. Border Patrol and state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies. Based on risk, cross-border traffic and border-related threat intelligence, nearly 84 percent of 2009 Operation Stonegarden funds went to Southwest border states.

Forging Unprecedented Cooperation with Mexico

• Secretary Napolitano and her Mexican counterparts have signed numerous bilateral agreements and declarations of cooperation to bolster cooperation in the areas of enforcement, planning, information and intelligence sharing, joint operations and trade facilitation along the Southwest border.

Strengthening Immigration Enforcement by Prioritizing Dangerous Criminal Aliens

• ICE has prioritized enforcement against convicted criminal aliens who pose the most danger to communities while strengthening oversight and consistency in immigration enforcement across the country.
  
  
• ICE has expanded the Secure Communities program, which uses biometric information to identify dangerous criminal aliens in state and local jails and remove them from the United States. Since its launch in October 2008, Secure Communities has identified more than 34,900 aliens charged with or convicted of the most serious, violent or major drug offenses, and removed more than 8,500 to date.
  
  
• ICE has changed the way it approaches worksite enforcement, prioritizing investigations of employers who exploit undocumented workers or commit criminal offenses.

Tangible Results of the Department's Efforts in the Past 18 Months:

• Overall Border Patrol apprehensions of illegal aliens decreased from over 723,800 in fiscal year 2008 to over 556,000 in fiscal year 2009, a 23 percent reduction, indicating that fewer people are attempting to illegally cross the border. From 2004-2009, the number of Border Patrol apprehensions along the Southwest border has decreased by 53 percent.
  
  
• Seizures of contraband rose significantly across the board last year compared to the year before: illegal bulk cash seizures rose 14 percent; illegal weapons seizures rose 29 percent; and illegal drugs seizures rose 15 percent.
  
  
• So far this year, ICE has removed more than 117,000 aliens convicted of crimes—a 37 percent increase as compared to the same time last year.
  
  
• In fiscal year 2009, ICE conducted more than 1,400 I-9 audits of employers suspected of hiring illegal labor—triple the number of audits conducted in fiscal year 2008.

For more information, visit www.dhs.gov .

http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1277310093825.shtm

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