DHS Authorizing Illegal Aliens to Work in U.S.

Napolitano: DHS Authorizing Illegal Aliens to Work in U.S.

By Edwin Mora October 19, 2011 (CNSNews.com) -- Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that under the administration’s policy of exercising “prosecutorial discretion” in the enforcement of the immigration laws, her department is currently authorizing some illegal aliens to work in the United States.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, asked Napolitano: “According to the information from your department, some individuals who are given relief will obtain work authorizations. So people with no right to be in the country will be allowed to work here. Is that correct?”Napolitano said: “Well, senator, since around 1986 there has been a process where those who are technically unlawfully in the country may apply for work authorization. This goes to CIS [Citizenship and Immigration Services]. It's not an ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] or CBP [Customs and Border Protection] function. And those cases are reviewed by CIS in a case-by-case basis. So there’s no change in that process.

Like I said, that goes back to the mid-80s that is contemplated now.”

Sen. Grassley then asked, “But yes, some of them could have an opportunity to work here even though they are here illegally?”

“Well, that happens now, senator,” said Napolitano.

The three agencies she mentioned are all components of DHS. Although Napolitano did not specify what 1986 policy she was referring to in her response to Sen. Grassley, President Ronald Reagan signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act into law in November of that year. The act applied to illegal aliens who requested a change of status within 18 months of the law's passage and who had come into the United States prior to Jan. 1, 1982, and had resided in America since that time.

According to the latest figures from the Department of Labor, the national unemployment rate is 9.1 percent and the number of unemployed persons has reached at least 14 million.

In a June 17 memo, ICE Director John Morton ordered federal immigration officials to use "prosecutorial discretion" in deciding which illegal aliens to remove from the country.

The purpose of the “prosecutorial discretion” policy is to remove the worst offenders while releasing others, particularly victims of domestic violence and other crimes; witnesses to crimes; or people who are charged with minor traffic violations.“Exercising favorable discretion, such as release from detention and deferral or a stay of removal generally will be appropriate,” Morton said, unless the unauthorized alien poses national security concerns, has a “serious criminal history,” poses a threat to public safety, is a human rights violator or is involved in “significant” immigration fraud.

During Wednesday’s hearing, Napolitano mentioned that as a result of the “prosecutorial discretion” policy, the Obama administration will review “roughly 300,000” cases that are on the “master docket of what’s pending in immigration courts.”

“The goal” of that process is “to administratively close some of the low priority cases so that we can facilitate handling the higher priority cases,” said Napolitano. That indicates that some illegal immigrants will be allowed to stay in the country because their cases will be closed.

Although she did not rule out the possibility, Napolitano said that “absent unusual circumstances,” individuals with a final order of removal will not be eligible for relief once their case is reviewed.The review process is intended “for cases that are pending that are clogging up the docket and preventing us from getting to the higher priority cases,” said Napolitano.

In defending the “prosecutorial discretion” policy, she told the Senate committee, “We can just remove anybody without any priorities and that would be one way to do it. Or the other way and the better way … is to say we want to focus on expediting the removal of those who are criminals; of those who are fugitives; of those who are repeat violators; of those who are recent entrants meaning within five years into the United States,” all of whom she referred to as “high priority” cases.“At some point in the process there needs to be decisions made about who is to be removed,” she said. “It cost in the neighborhood of $23,000 to $30,000 to actually remove somebody. That’s our cost, [it] doesn’t include Justice Department cost. The Congress gives us the ability to finance removals of 400,000 people a year.”

Napolitano pointed out that an “interagency group” is currently working on how to go about reviewing the estimated 300,000 cases. A “pilot” approach to reviewing the cases will start in “two to three weeks,” she said.

“The pilot is not going to be one of these 6-to-12 months typical pilots,” she added. “It will be very short, and it’s designed to find logistical issues that happen when you’re trying to do (a)

massive review of lots of cases all at the same time.”

On Tuesday, the Obama administration announced that it removed a record 396,906 individuals in fiscal year 2011, which ended on Sept. 30. That number is about 3,000 below the 400,000 immigrants that congressionally allocated resources allows DHS to remove.

The nearly 397,00O illegal aliens removed in fiscal 2011 includes 216,698 (55 percent) individuals who were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors.

In the course of today’s hearing, Sen. Grassley and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) accused Napolitano of inflating the numbers.

Napolitano subsequently acknowledged that the fiscal 2011 removal numbers include immigrants deported in fiscal 2010. The reason for that, according to the secretary, is that DHS waits until the individual is verified to have left the country before counting them as a removal.

Secretary Napolitano did not specify how many of the FY 2011 removals were from FY 2010.

However, Sen. Sessions said, “I’m told that ICE carried over from last year 19,000 removals and they’re counting them this year, and it’s sort of a gimmick to making the removals look higher than they are.”

Our moral decline: Blood-lust in the streets of Libya suffices for justice Patrick Henningsen Infowars.com October 20, 2011 It appears that Libya’s former leader Muammar Gaddafi may have been handed down his final verdict by NATO rebels, but it’s perhaps an even more bloody awful fate already suffered by a morally detached western civilization.

The man who liberated his country from the tyrannical monarchy of King Idris back in 1969… was tried and sentenced by bullet today.

Gaddafi modeled himself after Omar Mukhtar, The Lion of the Desert, the only other man who has led a genuine, independent Libyan resistance, fighting against a brutal Italian colonization in 1927. Yet, our media tell us it’s just another dead tyrant.

This has become the new narrative in the US and western Europe now, where foreign leaders and other non-state actors with brown skin are given lengthy trials through press briefings by suited politicians in places like Washington, London and Paris, echoed by the corporate media until an antagonist is born for public consumption.

Following the White House’s comical staged hoax of SEAL Team 6?s gallant raid on long-dead Osama bin Laden, and with no evidence to show it actually happened other than President Obama’s TV speeches- we get the next public assassination. After all, Obama’s far-fetched tale of the bin-Laden mission somehow vindicated all those innocent lives ruined by US incarceration and outright torture of thousands of young men since the War on Terror officially began in 2001.

Al Jazeera will no doubt play the shaky cell phone video of the man being stripped and dragged through the streets of Sirte by the NATO rebel mob. Somehow they believe, Gaddafi’s brutal post-mortem will vindicate their careless efforts and somehow make right the thousands of innocents who have perished- so that Libya can finally become part of the globalist, debt-based, neoliberal economic IMF system.

The west and its banking elite have nothing left to plunder other than middle class pension funds

and incomes, so it is relying on countries in the east and south in order to refill its sadly diminishing coffers.

The same treatment was given to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Like Gaddafi and Osama bin Laden, he worked hand in hand with America’s CIA and Britain’s MI6 in order to help western intelligence agencies achieve their operational goals, and thus the foreign policy objectives of the US, Great Britain and Israel. Grainy cell phone videos of Saddam’s circus execution somehow vindicated those in the west who liquidated so many innocent Iraqi lives since 1991, and arguably before.

This is the new trend in dispensing due process, in a declining western civilization where blood-lust suffices for justice.

After the protracted media trials of both Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, globalist power-brokers will never allow their war criminals to stand trial and spill the beans on all their dirty little secrets.

Over the last few decades, both Americans and western Europeans have become well-trained media consumers, and absorb their talking points much in the same way that grade school children dutifully repeat after their teachers and walk in single file. As adults, their teachers are CNN, FOX, the BBC, and the newest addition to the state information corps, US CENTCOM’s own Al Jazeera. None of them have any genuine moral or ethical perspective left in their editorial vision.

The corporate networks will reserve any real humanitarian compassion for a handful of trapped miners, baby seals, missing Caucasian children and Amanda Knox.

Our new teachers have taught the dutifully-minded among us that when the mob labels a head of state or non-state actor as a tyrant, then regime change must take place, and that this man deserves to die. They have taught us that one dead US soldier is worth more in headlines than 100 dead brown skinned Iraqis, Afghanis, Palestinians, or Libyans- women and children included. That is the overwhelming power of the 21st century media.

Will Libya have anything near the stability it enjoyed over the last 30 years? Will its people enjoy the mountain of state benefits available to them under the Gaddafi rein? Will Libyans be able to retain ownership of their country’s bounty of natural resources, and see the state reinvesting its profits back into their country for the benefit of future generations?

History has taught us that the answer to each and every one of these questions is of course… no.

History has written all over the sands of the Maghreb of North Africa, and Libya in particular. It has always been under the thumb of one empire or another- from the Romans, the Spanish, the Vatican’s Knights of Malta, the Ottomans, and Mussolini’s Italy.

Libya’s first brush with America came in the early 19th century, when war broke out between the United States and what was then referred to as Tripolitania, in what came to be known as the Barbary Wars. Only this time around the Barbary pirates are on the other side of the fighting, and they are known the world over by the name of ‘NATO’.

It’s only fitting that this latest chapter of history should be written as follows…

It was clear from day one that the Anglo-American empire, along with its clients like Qatar, were actively supporting and planning to bring destablization to the country. From the very first days of the civil war in Janurary 2011, before the shell casings had even hit the ground, western envoys and consultants worked with known al-Qaida fighters and criminals in Libya to form a new NTC government, a new central bank and a new state oil holding company. NATO were deployed to give brutal air support to these new gangs of rebel paramilitaries, and for nearly 10 months, both those groups killed, tortured, raped and looted everything in their path.

Meanwhile, offshore transnational corporations from the US, Europe and Qatar carved up the country’s assets. Months followed years of instability, infighting and acts of internal retribution followed. The poor became poorer, the rich became richer, organized crime blossomed and thousands of middle class Libyans were allowed to immigrate to the UK, France and Italy.

This would come to be known as Libya’s liberation.

What it means The UN issued the citation, and NATO came in with the tow truck. Make no mistake, in the real world, NATO is the USA and the USA is NATO. It’s a politically correct way of using military force without being seen to be acting alone as an imperial aggressor. But what about the NTC’s death squads, the theft, the rape, the torture and destruction of citizens’ property, business, and whole lives? To pass the buck a little further, NATO’s goals and end-game is handed over to Libya’s NTC, this way everyone’s asses are covered.

Politicans in Washington, London and Paris should be proud. They got everything they wanted, and with no dirt under their nails.

If no one in the US, UK, France, the UN or NATO’s technicians of death are held accountable for the sacking and looting of Libya- the crime of the 21st century, then expect that they will simply move forward, and do it again, and again. So who’s next? Syria?

There is no more moral highground, no more western values, no beliefs to use as a back-stop for western civilization.

Was Gaddafi guilty? Is that it, a bullet? He will never be afforded the same trial that anyone reading this article would expect as their god-given right. So what makes any among us believe that we deserve any of these so-called rights?

Who are we kidding?