The Dept. of Homeland Security has gone public with another eyebrow-raising part of their "war on terror"/get tough at the border policies: Customs and Border Protection agents can, without explanation, take away a laptop, cellphone or many other electronic devices from people entering the country. The Washington Post's ...

Prosecutions of immigrants who illegally cross the U.S.-Mexican border are way up, reports the Washington Post’s Spencer S. Hsu. The Department of Homeland Security’s “Operation Streamline,” instituted in December 2005, has started the practice of jailing and prosecuting all border crossers. One result of the policy is that ...

The New York Times’ Randel C. Archibold and Andrew Becker uncover the potentially huge security problem of border patrol agents taking bribes. In 2007, the Dept. of Homeland Security launched 79 investigations into border agents suspected of taking payoffs to let immigrants coming from Mexico into ...

The New York Times’ Randal C. Archibold and Julia Preston provide a great rundown of the myriad political, economic, environmental, and—oh yeah—security issues involved in building a fence across the Texas-Mexican border. Dept. of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff insists on going forward with a $2.1 billion, 670-mile fence (or ...

The U.S. Border Patrol announced yesterday that in just the last six months apprehensions at the Mexican border had dropped 17 percent to 347,000. Shockingly, The Department of Homeland Security’s border patrol was not instantly credited for its brilliance in cracking down on illegal immigration. Instead, the Wall ...

The Washington Post’s Spencer S. Hsu flags the efforts by 14 Democrats, including eight chairman of Congressional committees, to stop building 470 miles of fence along the U.S-Mexico border. Building the remaining fence would result in the Department of Homeland Security violating 30 environmental laws. These are some rather, um, ...

There is a growing disconnect between get-tough-at-the-border political rhetoric and public policy that has not been sufficiently funded by the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection division. The result, according to the Washington Time’s Jerry Seper, is local communities devoting precious law enforcement resources to rounding up undocumented immigrants.

The New York Time’s Julia Preston chronicles the Department of Homeland Security’s insistence that Boeing’s $133 million contact to create a virtual fence on the Mexican border went just fine. DHS officials say that while the fence can’t extend across all 2,000 miles of the border, a 28-mile pilot project ...

A lawsuit is being filed against the Customs and Border Protection division of the Department of Homeland Security over searches and confiscations of laptop computers, phones, and PDAs at the nation's airports.  Ellen Nakashima reports in the Washington Post that travelers have had laptops seized (and never returned) and cell ...

Arizona, with what may be the largest population of illegal immigrants in the U.S., is grappling with a state law that forces businesses to fire workers who are in the country illegally.  Arizona is on the front lines since Congress and the White House couldn't push through a new approach ...