DHS - Page 3 of 3 - THE RIDGEWOOD BLOG.

Posted on October 7, 2015 October 7, 2015

DHS Confesses: No Databases Exist To Vet Syrian Refugees

10/06/2015 06:47 PM ET

Immigration: As the White House prepares to dump another 10,000 Syrian refugees on U.S. cities, it assures us these mostly Muslim men undergo a “robust screening” process. Not so, admits the agency responsible for such vetting.

Under grilling from GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions, head of the Senate subcommittee on immigration, the Homeland Security official in charge of vetting Syrian and other foreign Muslim refugees confessed that no police or intelligence databases exist to check the backgrounds of incoming refugees against criminal and terrorist records.

“Does Syria have any?” Sessions asked. “The government does not, no sir,” answered Matthew Emrich, associate director for fraud detection and national security at DHS’ U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Sessions further inquired: “You don’t have their criminal records, you don’t have the computer database that you can check?” Confessed Emrich: “In many countries the U.S. accepts refugees from, the country did not have extensive data holdings.”

While a startling admission, it confirms previous reporting. Senior FBI officials recently testified that they have no idea who these people are, and they can’t find out what type of backgrounds they have — criminal, terrorist or otherwise — because there are no vetting opportunities in those war-torn countries.

Syria and Iraq, along with Somalia and Sudan, are failed states where police records aren’t even kept. Agents can’t vet somebody if they don’t have documentation and don’t even have the criminal databases to screen applicants.

So the truth is, we are not vetting these Muslim refugees at all. And as GOP presidential front-runners duly note, it’s a huge gamble to let people from hostile nations enter the U.S. without any meaningful background check. It’s a safer bet just to limit, if not stop, their immigration.

“If I win, they’re going back,” Donald Trump vowed. “They could be ISIS. This (mass Syrian immigration) could be one of the great tactical ploys of all time.”

Posted on August 10, 2015 August 10, 2015

DHS admits new surge of illegal immigrant families

By Stephen Dinan – The Washington Times – Friday, August 7, 2015

The country saw another surge of illegal immigrant families crossing the border in July, a top Homeland Security official told a federal court late Thursday as the administration begged a judge not to forbid detention of new migrant mothers and children.

Deputy Border Patrol Chief Ronald Vitiello said the number of illegal immigrant families captured at the border rose in July, bucking a trend and worrying officials who had been expecting the number of families to drop as the heat increases in late summer, just as the number of unaccompanied minors does.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/7/dhs-admits-new-surge-illegal-immigrant-families/

Posted on July 12, 2015 July 12, 2015

Lesson form the 1980 Mariel boat lift

Jimmy Carter’s disastrous DREAM ACT: the Mariel boat lift
Gil Guignat
Phoenix Conservative Examiner

There are some 500,000 illegal immigrants plowing through Arizona every year. The damage to the environment is staggering. The crime from the drug trade is appalling. President Obama in his infinite wisdom now has enacted a policy to let anyone who can drive, walk or fly into the United States stay indefinitely and apply for a work permit and welfare benefits.

It is amazing that President Obama is competing with PresidentJimmy Carter for who has the most stupid and disastrous DREAM ACT and who will have had the most destructive administration to the country’s wellbeing in the history of the United States.

The year was 1980 and the economy in Cuba was in shambleswhere the Cuban GDP shrank by 35%. Our genius president at the time was Jimmy Carter. He agreed along with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro to allow whoever wanted to leave Cuba to come and immigrate to the United States with no pre-conditions. The departure of these Cuban immigrants occurred from the Mariel Harbor in Cuba between April 15 and October 31 1980.

Not surprisingly, Obama’s DREAM ACT policies now allow anyone on the planet to walk, drive or fly to the United States with no pre-conditions. The new arrivals will also be allowed to apply for work permits and all welfare benefits.

Over 125,000 Cuban immigrants came into Florida and unemployment went up a whopping 50%. What do you think will happen to unemployment now that President Obama has announced to the whole planet that anyone can come and stay in the United States?

Criminals and the mentally ill

The Mariel boatlift started going badly when it was discovered that Castro emptied his prisons and asylums. He put the inmates on boats and sent them to Florida. Basically, President Carter created the necessary conditions so that the United States would be viewed as a dumping ground for the worst of the worst in society.

“Fidel Castro declared that those who were leaving the country were Lumpens (or undesirables) and the escoria (or scum) of Cuban society. America had been tricked into receiving Cuba’s undesirables among the refugees. Base-level cells of the Cuban Communist Party staged meetings at the homes of those known to be leaving the country. People were intimidated by these “repudiation meetings” (mitines de repudio) where the participants screamed obscenities and defiled the facades of the homes, throwing eggs and garbage, for hours. Those who opposed the intimidation became victims of the attacks themselves and lost their jobs or their seats at the college or university that they had been attending.Towards the end of the crisis, the repudiation meetings were forbidden, but the damage had already been done.

With no diplomatic ties or methods to distinguish refugee from inmate, many released inmates were eventually jailed in Florida for crimes they committed after their arrival.” More

Notice the last two lines of the above quote. The criminals that came from Castro’s emptied jails ended up in American jails.Homeland Security SecretaryJanet Napolitano recently said that granting work permits and essentially permanent status to illegal aliens would allow DHS to focus on the criminal elements. How exactly are they going to know what is criminal and what is not as millions of immigrants start flooding the borders? How exactly are they going to know which ones have criminal records in their respective countries and which ones do not? The answer is that they simply do not know. Arizona alone gets 500,000 illegal immigrants per year passing through the state.

https://www.examiner.com/article/jimmy-carter-s-disastrous-dream-act-the-mariel-boat-lift

Posted on April 30, 2015 April 29, 2015

DHS Chief Promises Improvements After Show Blasts ‘Dysfunctional’ Department

By Eric Katz
April 6, 2015

The Homeland Security Department is a bloated bureaucracy, too large and disparate to effectively manage as one entity.

Such was the takeaway from a report on 60 Minutes, the famed news magazine program on CBS. The report focused on a series of interviews with DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, who defended the department and the progress it has made to better coordinate its 240,000-person workforce and its array of components.

“Johnson’s department has never been more central to the War on Terror,” 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl said. “But it has come under almost constant criticism for, over the years, weak management and low morale.”

She added Johnson faces a “management nightmare,” as DHS agencies and sub-agencies have no clear common functionality binding them together.

“This department is a disparate amalgam of things that don’t fit together very well,” said Clark Ervin, the former DHS inspector general. “Making the department work, making it more effective and efficient, economical, is a security issue. To the extent the department isn’t optimally performing, that is a security deficiency.”

The report spent little time explaining how DHS came together in its current form. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, the George W. Bush administration and lawmakers determined domestic security efforts were spread too far apart in the sprawling federal bureaucracy, and bringing them together would improve coordination of protection efforts. No matter the origins, 60 Minutespostulated DHS’ structure was unsustainable.

https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/fedblog/2015/04/DHS-Chief-Promises-Improvements-After-Show-Blasts-Dysfunctional-Department/109378/?oref=recentposts

Posted on April 20, 2015 April 19, 2015

Rep Gohmert – DHS Too Busy Importing, Transporting Illegals All Over America To Bother With Security

by Rick Wells 04/19/2015

Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-TX) doesn’t think much of the job that Jeh Johnson and the Department of Homeland “Security” are doing in protecting us, particularly in light of the recent unauthorized and surprise landing of a small helicopter on the lawn of the Capitol. In an interview on the Lars Larson program, Gohmert doesn’t pull any punches in his evaluation and criticism of DHS, an agency that is currently little more than an anti-American political arm of the Obama regime.

After directing some sarcasm towards the ineffective bureaucracy, Gohmert says, “The truth is it ought to scare people because Homeland Security is so overwhelmed in trying to bring in and ship around illegal aliens and give amnesty to as many people as they can.” He faults the focus on lawbreaking and circumvention as the reason why, “They can’t do something as simple as protect the United States Capitol.”

He continues, saying, “A lot of people thought the fourth plane that those American heroes took down in Pennsylvania was probably going for the White House, information I had was he was going to the Capitol. And there are some surveys that show that the U.S. Capitol is the most recognized building in the world.”

Posted on April 11, 2015 April 11, 2015

Homeland Security Releases Emails Showing Political Influence for Sony, Time Warner Projects

April 10, 2015 4:15pm PT by Eriq Gardner

The newly released documents buttress a report issued late last month detailing how an immigration director was swayed with respect to hundreds of millions of dollars in film and TV investments under the EB-5 visa program.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has released hundreds of pages of emails plus other documents in support of its investigation of improper influence on the EB-5 immigration program. Many of the documents discuss hundreds of millions of dollars in financing for film and television productions from Sony Pictures and Time Warner with prominent politicians including former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendall and the office of former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa interjecting in an effort to get approvals.

Since inception in 1990, the EB-5 visa program allows foreign nationals to become conditional permanent residents upon an investment of at least $500,000 for a qualifying project that creates American jobs. Entertainment studios begun to eye the program to get film investment capital, but some projects have been rejected. For example, in 2009, Lionsgate was denied funding from EB-5 investors because it was determined that the studio was not legally obligated to accept the funding.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/homeland-security-releases-emails-showing-787829

Posted on February 27, 2015 February 26, 2015

“Let’s Just Kill ‘Homeland Security'” Already!

“Let’s Just Kill ‘Homeland Security'” Already!

Nick Gillespie|Feb. 25, 2015 2:07 pm

After you’ve read through Jesse Walker’s exclusive look at the much-hyped Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report of “sovereign citizens,” check out my argument for disbanding DHS altogether. Created in the “mad crush of panic, paranoia, and patriotic pants-wetting after the 9/11 attacks,” DHS oversees 22 agencies. It was a stupid idea from the beginning and it has continued to disappoint. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) regularly lists it as awful and ineffective at just about anything except wasting taxpayer dollars and surveys of federal employees document that even the Post Office has higher employee morale.

Absent legislative action, come Friday DHS will be unfunded due to an ongoing fight over Barack Obama’s executive action regarding illegal immigration. The Republican Congress is threatening to pull funding for the whole department and the Dems are (so far) standing firm in their threat to shut down the government.

In my latest Daily Beast column, I argue that scrapping over this small corner of DHS activities misses the bigger picture insight that the whole cabinet-level departmet should be chucked “into the dustbin.”

https://reason.com/blog/2015/02/25/lets-just-kill-homeland-security-already

Posted on February 21, 2015 February 21, 2015

Department of Homeland Security stumped that employees don’t like their jobs

Department of Homeland Security stumped that employees don’t like their jobs
February 21,2015
Greta Van Susteren

You won’t believe this one — actually, you will because this kind of stupid stuff by our government does not stop. You just paid for a study as to why Homeland Security employees have low morale. Really? taxpayer money for a study why government employees don’t like their jobs?

But it gets even worse….Department of Homeland was stumped by the FIRST study and did TWO more of the same! Who authorizes this stuff???

“Afflicted with the lowest morale of any large federal agency, the Department of Homeland Security did what comes naturally to many in government.
It decided to study the problem. And then study it some more.
The first study cost about $1 million. When it was finished, it was put in a drawer. The next one cost less but duplicated the first. It also ended up in a drawer…” [Washington Post today]

But it gets worse:

“…So last year, still stumped about why the employees charged with safeguarding Americans are so unhappy, the department commissioned two more studies….”

—
https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/f626eba8-b15c-11e4-886b-c22…

Posted on December 12, 2014 December 12, 2014

DHS: 100 Million Americans Could Lose Power in Major Sun Storm

DHS: 100 Million Americans Could Lose Power in Major Sun Storm

Document says FEMA unsure of damage to grid from magnetic storm

Sun emits a mid-level flare Dec. 4, 2014 / AP

BY: Bill Gertz
December 12, 2014 5:00 am

Millions of Americans face catastrophic loss of electrical power during a future magnetic space storm that will disrupt the electric grid and cause cascading infrastructure failures, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document.

DHS’ Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) stated in an internal 2012 fact sheet outlining its response plan for severe “space weather” that the actual impact and damage from a future solar storm is not known.

“An analysis of the space weather impacts indicates that the greatest challenge will be to provide life-saving and life-sustaining resources for large numbers of people that experience long-term power outage from damage to the U.S. electrical grid,” the FEMA document, dated March 1, 2012, states.

The FEMA fact sheet noted the findings of a 2010 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency that monitors sun storms, warning that an extreme solar storm could leave “130 million people without power for years,” and destroy or damage more than 300 hard-to-replace electrical grid transformers.

Major solar storms are rare. Two major solar disruption events took place in 1859 and 1921, times when electricity was less prevalent than today.

The study said a future solar storm like the great magnetic storm of May 1921 would black out most states east of the Mississippi River along with most states in the Pacific Northwest.

The long-term loss of electrical power likely would produce catastrophic loss of life.

However, the FEMA document disputed that worst-case scenario, noting that in 2011 DHS experts were “not convinced” about the dire consequences outlined in the earlier study.

Still, DHS scientists in 2011 warned that the U.S. electric grid remains vulnerable to damage from an extreme geomagnetic storm. The scientists said the extent of damage to high-voltage transformers from a space storm “are not well known” and the matter needs further study, the report says.

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/dhs-100-million-americans-could-lose-power-in-major-sun-storm/

Posted on January 31, 2014 January 30, 2014

DHS seizes $21.6 million in fake NFL merchandise, arrests 50 involved

DHS seizes $21.6 million in fake NFL merchandise, arrests 50 involved

Ahead of the Super Bowl, federal officials announced a crackdown on counterfeit National Football League merchandise, revealing the seizure of more than $21.6 million in fake NFL merchandise, Thursday.

In an initiative called “Operation Team Player,” the feds targeted international shipments of counterfeit merchandise from abroad as it came into the United States, as well as warehouses, stores, online vendors, and street vendors selling counterfeit goods and tickets nationwide. The operation began in June.

“Our agents are committed to combating the criminal enterprises selling counterfeit products which undermine our economy, and take jobs away from Americans,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director John Sandweg said in a statement. “No good comes from counterfeiting American products regardless of whether they are jerseys, airbags or pharmaceuticals.

Read more: https://dailycaller.com/2014/01/30/dhs-seizes-21-6-million-in-fake-nfl-merchandise-arrests-50-involved/#ixzz2rvchJoZ4

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