Securing The Homeland
CNN tells us that Thousands mistakenly allowed past U.S. border, report says
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Government watchdogs have found that thousands of people who shouldn’t have been admitted to the United States were mistakenly allowed in last year because of security lapses at legal border crossings.
The number of inadmissible aliens who managed to enter through official ports of entry in 2006 was not disclosed in Monday’s report from the Government Accountability Office.
However, a source who has seen a full version of the report, in which those statistics were included, put the total at 21,000.
But this isn’t a problem because the professionals at ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] will be out and about scooping them up as soon as they clean up the problems from their costume party: Immigration chief apologizes for ‘offensive’ costumes at her party
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Department of Homeland Security will investigate a Halloween costume party hosted by a top immigration official and attended by a man dressed in a striped prison outfit, dreadlocks and darkened skin make-up, a costume some say is offensive, the department’s secretary said.
Julie Myers, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and host of the fundraising party, was on a three-judge panel that originally praised the prisoner costume for “originality.”
Myers later apologized for “a few of the costumes,” calling them “inappropriate and offensive.” She said she and other senior managers “deeply regret that this happened.”
A department photographer photographed Myers with the man, but the images were deleted after the costume were deemed offensive, ICE spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said.
Between 50 and 75 people attended the party, which was a fundraiser for the Combined Federal Campaign, a federal government collection of charities.
Ms Myers has all of the qualifications for dealing with these problems: she’s the niece of Rumsfeld’s first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, and the wife of Chertoff’s former chief of staff , John F. Wood, with no law enforcement or management experience to confuse her. The Shrubbery was so impressed he gave her a recess appointment.
8 comments
Thing is, there’s so many names on that inadmissable list that if they strictly enforced it, they’d have days-long delays at the border trying to sort out the people with the same name as others on the list from the people who are really the people they’re trying to stop from entering the country. It’s like that “no fly list” — the Feds are so scared that they might leave off someone’s name, they put almost *everyone’s* name on the damned thing, making it pretty much useless.
– Badtux the Named Penguin
Oh, regarding the party — sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if the Bush Administration wasn’t staffed with crazy racist people. On the other hand, might as well wonder what the world would be like if cotton candy grew on trees…
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
The problem is that half the GOP want the cheap labor and the other half is panicked by an increase melanin in the general population. Having done some work with the border guys, this problem has been going on forever. Stop the “bad guys” but don’t slow commerce, which can be interpreted as “the crops will rot without pickers so don’t be so picky at the border”.
I have come back over the border from picking up a relative who was stranded down in Baja driving a van I would have pulled over in a second as a drug vehicle, and got waved right through, and then ended up at secondary inspection while taking my parents on a trip to Tijuana in a car with military parking stickers on it. There is no rhyme or reason.
You hire people from the wingnut “colleges” and you get the haters. I love the part of the article where she says she didn’t notice he was wearing “make-up” to darken his skin. Yeah, right, because blackface is such a subtle effect.
21,000 terrorists?! that’s enough hijackers to crash 4400 planes!! omg!! that’s enough planes to kill, like, 3 million people!! we’re all gonna die!!!1!1111!!!
Since we don’t have 4400 airliners I guess they are going to have to build them first, or pick strawberries. 😈
🙂
well, i’m assuming that i was supposed to read that b-i-i-i-i-g number and be afraid, very afraid. but 21,000 is 0.005% of the total of 400 million border crossings that they [finally!] tell us about at the very end of the article. >40,000 traffic deaths in the country every year and nobody bats an eye, but i’m supposed to be scared of possibly as many 21,000 furriners.
although, we might ought to catch that guy who keeps bringing his tb germs back into the country and just toss him into the hospital.
but yeah, let them pick strawberries.
All this crap has done is trap millions of agricultural workers in this country who used to come up, doing the picking and then go home with their wages. Now it cost so much to get back in that they stay in this country, living rough between jobs, and catching all kinds of things from a lack of sanitation in their camps.
They don’t want to be here, they just want to do the migratory picking jobs for the cash they need to build a house and start a little farm. That’s the way the system worked for generations. People don’t want the growers to build decent housing, because a couple of them tried when I lived in SoCal and got buried under land use ordinances for trying to put up barracks buildings with real plumbing for their pickers to speed up the harvest.
The wages wouldn’t be bad if you didn’t have to live in SoCal, but local people can’t afford to do it with the cost of living and lack of affordable housing.