February 20, 2012 Right Side News Reports from the·Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in this legislative weekly including:

• President's Budget Seeks Cuts in Immigration Enforcement
• Illegal Alien Arrested in Plot to Bomb U.S. Capitol
• House Appropriators Question Administration's Priorities
• Congress Opts to Continue Giving Tax Dollars to Illegal Aliens
• Immigration Subcommittee Examines USCIS "Get-to-Yes" Culture
• New Mexico Senate Insists on Giving Driver's Licenses to Illegal Aliens

Immigration law enforcement suffered another blow when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently announced the appointment of Andrew Lorenz-Strait as the nation’s first “public advocate” for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).  

According to ICE Director John Morton, the public advocate position was created by the Obama administration to handle questions and complaints by illegal aliens over the various changes the DHS has made in the past year concerning the way immigration authorities determine which undocumented immigrants are deported.

The very heart of FBI operations lies in our investigations—which serve, as our mission states, “to protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats and to enforce the criminal laws of the United States.” We currently have jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal law, and you can find the major ones here, grouped within our three national security priorities and our five criminal priorities. Also visit our Intelligence program site, which underpins and informs all our investigative programs.

After Declining by 1 Million 2007 to 2009   

WASHINGTON (February 15, 2012) – The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will soon release its new estimate of the illegal immigrant population in the United States as of January 1, 2011. (All DHS estimates are for January 1.) Based on a preliminary analysis of some of the same data DHS uses, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that 10.9 million (± 200,000) illegal immigrants lived in the United States on January 1, 2011. If this estimate turns out to be similar to the DHS estimate, it means that the illegal immigrant population stopped declining after President Obama took office after declining by 1 million during the last two years of the Bush administration ─ 2007 to 2009.

In early December 2011, a US Department of Defense report about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) was leaked to the media.[1] The report, dubbed the "Quick Look Review" (QLR), was written by a committee that included some senior US defense establishment figures who were charged specifically with looking into the question of "concurrency," i.e., selling the airplane while the flight testing is still underway. The committee was set up in light of a less than glowing report about the flight tests submitted at the end of October.

It is not a movie. It could be labeled a comedy, a farce, even a Greek tragedy, except that people really are dying. It is in fact, an absolutely abhorrent, disgraceful and unacceptable demonstration of the hidebound, self-serving attitude, omnipresent throughout the Federal bureaucracy, and among many in our political establishment, that my agency, my mission, my job, is more important than anyone or anything else.  

It is called protecting turf, and the ugly fact, as any government analyst can tell you, is that the federal government spends more time doing it than practically anything else. (And Obama wants to give our medical care over to them, no less!) It is bad enough that these petty turf battles squander agency time and resources, but when they dictate policies regulating combat operations, they can become deadly.