Property of the People (previously) used Freedom of Information Act requests to force the Department of Homeland Security to reveal that it tracks members of the Valve Turners -- a nonviolent environmental group that practices civil disobedience against oil pipelines -- alongside of white nationalist mass-murderers and killers like Dylan Roof (the mass murderer behind the 2015 shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston) and James Fields, who murdered Heather Heyer when he drove his car into an anti-Nazi counterprotest in Charlottesvilla. Read the rest

The Trump administration's brazen propaganda game has always been strong, and always finds impressive new ways to out-horrible itself.

So this is really just the latest example of dehumanizing language presented in an official context.

Of course Border Patrol isn't going to let a random group of radical political activists show up and start injecting people with drugs. https://t.co/k8e9hYSOSy

— DHS Press Secretary (@SpoxDHS) December 10, 2019

The Washington Examiner article linked to in the tweet is hardly objective, but even it still holds back from this kind of labelling.

Left-wing organizations that have called for the closing of immigrant detention facilities said they were turned away from a Border Patrol facility in Southern California after showing up to provide what they said were flu vaccines for detainees.

Members from Doctors for Camp Closures, Families Belong Together, and Never Again Action arrived at the Chula Vista Border Patrol Station in San Ysidro, California, Monday saying they wanted to vaccinate adults and children in temporary custody. The organizations said employees from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, who oversee station operations, turned them away.

Which part of this is "radical," exactly? Is it the belief in vaccines? Treating immigrants like human beings? Trying to prevent disease from spreading? Or handing out free healthcare?

I'm even willing (begrudgingly so) to overlook the CBP policy that allegedly required these Border Patrol agents to turn the doctors away. Maybe there's a reason for that policy that's not inherently xenophobic and authoritarian (maybe); the Examiner article does note that, "Detainees at Border Patrol facilities are not supposed to be kept for more than 72 hours, and people can get flu vaccines after they are transferred out of CBP custody to other agencies." Read the rest

After news broke last week that Google's latest head of national security policy engagement was Miles Taylor, former chief of staff to DHS undersecretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Google tried to calm its outraged staff by insisting that Taylor had nothing to do with Trump's Kids in Cages policy that shattered families forever and murdered innocent children, nor with Trump's racist ethnic cleansing Muslim Ban. Read the rest

The administration of Donald Trump is pulling $270 million from the Department of Homeland Security, including $155 million of FEMA disaster relief funding, to pay for all migrant concentration camps, according to DHS and a leading congressional Democrat.

Money will also reportedly be taken away from the budget for planned upgrades to the National Cybersecurity Protection System, and new equipment for the U.S. Coast Guard.

Everything is awful, and getting worse.

From Reuters:

The money, which was also set aside for the U.S. Coast Guard, will be used to pay for detention facilities and courts for migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. DHS officials say they have been overwhelmed by a surge of asylum-seeking migrants who are fleeing violence and poverty in Central America.

The Trump administration is seeking to circumvent Congress and move money originally designated for other programs. This will allow the administration to continue to house immigrants arriving at the border, part of President Donald Trump’s promise not to “catch and release” migrants and allow them to await hearings outside of custody.

The administration plans to take $115 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster-relief fund just as hurricane season is heating up in the Atlantic Ocean, according to a letter from U.S. Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard, who chairs the congressional panel that oversees Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending.

The letter also details that money will be taken for planned upgrades to the National Cybersecurity Protection System and new equipment for the U.S. Coast Guard, Roybal-Allard said.

Last Mother's Day, grandmother Rhonda Mengert was subjected to a pat-down search at Tulsa airport, wherein a TSA agent felt a panty-liner in her underwear; she was then forced to strip down and show her panty-liner to a female TSA agent. Naturally, she filed suit against the TSA. Read the rest

A Federal appeals court today upheld an order that requires Trump immigration authorities with the US Customs and Border Patrol to provide detained migrant kids with the humane basics: food, water, bedding, toothbrushes, soap, and conditions in which children can be expected to sleep.

“Assuring that children eat enough edible food, drink clean water, are housed in hygienic facilities with sanitary bathrooms, have soap and toothpaste, and are not sleep-deprived are without doubt essential to the children’s safety,” said the court.

A lot of ICE agents are gonna haz a sad tonight, as will Donald Trump's White House concentration camp advocate Stephen Miller. Read the rest

Back in 2012, Jon Corbett made headlines by showing that he could easily get metal through TSA checkpoints' full-body pornoscanners: his experiences fighting the TSA convinced him to get his law license and hang out a shingle, and now he has his first client: Rhonda Mengert, a grandmother who was illegally strip-searched by the Tulsa TSA because they felt a panty-liner when they patted down her crotch. On Mother's Day. Read the rest

Kirstjen Nielsen was Trump's DHS Secretary, where she oversaw the performatively cruel practice of separating thousands of children from their parents, in a calculatedly shambolic and chaotic way, ensuring that many of them will never be reunited with their families. Read the rest

The Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday issued an “emergency” security alert urging federal civilian agencies to secure login credentials for their respective internet domain records. Read the rest

Trump isn't America's most anti-immigrant president; that honor goes to Obama, the great deporter, who also extensively tested border wall technologies while deporting 2MM undocumented people. Read the rest

The US Department of Homeland Security has published a new proposed rule that would make people ineligible for US citizenship if their credit-scores were poor. Read the rest

Atlantic reporter Rosie Gray obtained emails that show a former Homeland Security employee was involved in planning social events with white supremacists, self-described racists, and 'white advocates'. The DHS response: "This type of radical ideology runs counter to the Department’s mission of keeping America safe."

Emails reveal that a former Homeland Security Official official was connected to white supremacists. Ian M. Smith has since resigned from his position at the DHS. Read the rest

Harvard grad student Zainab Merchant is detained and invasively searched every time she flies; she's tried extensively to end this harassment, applying for Global Entry and Precheck, writing to her members of Congress, and trying to run through the DHS's Redress procedure. Read the rest

Federal Air Marshals are furious that they have been tasked to follow thousands of Americans who are not on any watch-list and not suspected of any crime; they shadow these people (who are selected for surveillance on the basis of flimsy criteria like once having visited Turkey) and send minute-by-minute updates to the TSA, noting whether their targets are sleeping, using more than one phone, waiting until the last minute to board their planes, observing boarding areas from a distance, and other innocuous behaviors. Read the rest

The news cycle isn’t kind to stories that take a long time to be told. Sure, no one ever stops talking about Trump and his uncle Vlad, but despite it all being a part of one two-year long shit show, there’s always something new and horrific to draw the eye. Not so with stories like the ones that are still playing on on the United States’ southern border, daily. Families are still being kept apart, kids barely able to talk are being asked to defend themselves in court, and individuals seeking asylum from the dangers of their homes are being turned away by customs agents or railroaded into custody with less than legal practices.

While much of the media has turned its focus to alleged Russian spies sleeping their way into influential positions, The Texas Tribune just keeps on keeping on: their reportage on the tragedies being played out on the U.S./Mexican border is has been absolutely outstanding. But, they’re a non-profit. In order to continue to do the sort of quality journalism that they’ve been churning out of late, they could use a hand.

Right now, the Texas Tribune is raising funds to open a newsroom in the Rio Grande Valley: an area of the state that, as it’s name suggests, lays along the Mexican border by the Rio Grande River. It’s where you’ll find McAllen and Brownesville – two of the cities where DHS has been splitting up families and stashing kids away in privately operated prisons. It’s ground zero for the Trump administration’s bigoted bullshit. Read the rest

One of the more fascinating and horrible details in Reuters' thoroughly fascinating and horrible long-form report on Trump's cruel border policies is this nugget: ICE hacked the risk-assessment tool it used to decide whom to imprison so that it recommended that everyone should be detained. Read the rest