The Texas Observer

It’s no secret that the 18-foot steel border wall is devastating the environment and disrupting wildlife corridors along our southern border. Environmentalists and landowners have filed lawsuits in federal court — to no avail — in order to compel the Department of Homeland Security to lessen the destructive impacts of the wall.

The Sierra Club commended 43 congressional members today for sending a letter to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. The members ask DHS to work with other agencies to lessen the impacts of the wall, fund efforts to buy comparable land for wildlife and provide environmental training for their employees.

In the letter, the congressional members wrote the following to Napolitano:
“As you are aware, hundreds of miles of new border fences and patrol roads have been constructed by DHS along the US/Mexico border in the past several years. This massive federal project has had deleterious consequences upon natural and cultural public resources, and has caused hardship for private land owners, whose lands have been condemned and livelihoods have been disrupted.”

Already $50 million has been allocated to borderlands mitigation, the congressional members note, but far more funding will be necessary to address the extent of the damage done, they wrote.

Besides the damage done there is also the cost of upkeep. We are now the owners of a 670-foot long steel wall which costs anywhere from $2 million to $11 million a mile. Besides the environmental degradation and the destruction of wildlife we will also being paying to keep it upright. The Congressional Research Service estimated it might cost up to $16,000 a mile just to  keep the wall intact.

A federal judge punted border wall construction back to Congress this week. U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton ruled that the Texas Border Coalition did not have any standing to file a lawsuit challenging the construction of a border wall through their cities and counties because they were not property owners.

The Texas Border Coalition is an organization of border mayors, county judges and business leaders from the Texas-Mexico border region. Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster, a member of the coalition said they were puzzled by the judge’s ruling.

“I’ve got fence going through my community,” Foster says. “I don’t understand how the judge could rule that I don’t have standing in the lawsuit.” Foster says that coalition members are speaking with their lawyer about whether they can file an appeal.

Judge Walton’s decision is not much of a surprise.  Just about every court that has heard a border fence lawsuit has kicked the can down the road by ruling that it’s up to Congress to stop the construction of the border wall. Despite the obvious violations of constitutional rights –such as seizing property without fair compensation — judges aren’t willing to side with landowners.

The building of 670 miles of 18-foot wall along the border continues under Obama — a disappointment to the hundreds of landowners in Texas who hoped their properties would be saved once Bush left the White House.

The Houston Chronicle is reporting today that President Obama won’t keep shoveling money into the Border Wall boondoggle. Finally some good news out of Washington.  At least taxpayers won’t be spending billions on an 18-foot steel and concrete wall which won’t solve an iota of the United State’s immigration issues.

Border landowners have been praying for this ever since Obama took office. The bad news is the government is going to finish the remaining miles of fence near Brownsville. The Obama Administration is going to fulfill the 670 miles of fence required by Congress under George W.’s reign.  Cameron County gets the tail-end of a raw deal — the poorly crafted and politicized public policies incorporated in the Secure Fence Act and the Real ID Act.

No one feels this more acutely than Brownsville Landowner Eloisa Tamez who has been fighting the Department of Homeland Security for two years over the construction of fence in her backyard. She recently lost her court battle and DHS threw up the wall almost overnight on her land. In a recent conversation with Tamez she said she plans to turn her home into a border and human rights center where academics can study immigration and border policy. What better place than 20 feet from the border wall — one of the worst government experiments in immigration policy to date.

Anywhere from 50 to 100 detainees at the sprawling Port Isabel Processing Center near Brownsville stopped eating last Wednesday in an effort to draw attention to extended detention that they say violates their right to due process.

One of the detainees on hunger strike - Rama Carty - spoke to the Observer by phone on Friday about how he has been detained by ICE for more than 13 months.

Listen:
Click here to download the interview

“It’s unconstitutional. It’s unjust,” Carty said. “We’re held well past any reasonable time under the law, or just any reasonable time, period.”

Carty fell under the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2008 after he served two years in prison for what he says is a wrongful drug conviction. He spent time in detention centers in Maine and New Hampshire before being sent to Texas in December. In March, he came across an article in USA Today about a new Amnesty International report on how thousands of immigrants are detained for months or years without any meaningful judicial review of whether they should be released.

“If immigration removal is not reasonably foreseeable at all, then detention, in essence, shouldn’t exist,” Carty said, citing a Supreme Court precedent for cases like his.

Carty turns 39 next week and has lived in the United States since he was a year old. His parents are Haitian, but he was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo while they were working there. Neither country will accept him, so he languishes in detention in the country he calls home.

“I am a U.S. citizen from a cultural standpoint,” Carty told the Observer.

He wants a chance to argue he is a citizen from a legal standpoint as well. He said ICE mishandled his mother’s application for naturalization, and he should be given an opportunity to be considered a citizen. But, like many in the 1,200-bed facility, he said he lacks access to legal assistance.

“We are told we have lawyers available thru pro-bono associations but that’s not the truth,” Carty said of the overwhelmed legal aid offices that mostly focus on political asylum cases. “The amount of effective assistance of counsel is grossly insufficient,” he said.

Carty says he thinks the hunger strike will continue to grow. The strikers’ demands include a meeting with Dora Schriro, the newly appointed special advisor on detention and removal for the Department of Homeland Security.

Some sad news today coming out of Brownsville. U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen ruled in favor of Homeland Security. Eloisa Tamez and several other landowners who were fighting the construction of an 18-foot border wall on their land must allow the government to start building.

Tamez, 73, has been one of the most spirited and outspoken opponents of the border wall. Her legal battle with DHS galvanized many other border residents to stand up for their Constitutional rights. The Observer has chronicled her struggle over the past year with the bureaucratic nightmare that is Homeland Security.

Tamez’ land which ranges north from the Rio Grande for about 3 acres has been in her family’s possession since the King of Spain granted it to them centuries ago. Now it will be marred by an unsightly 18-foot concrete and steel wall. A wall that will serve as nothing more than a symbol of ignorance and Washington D.C. political pandering. At an approximate price of $3 million up to $12 million a mile it will also continue to bleed the U.S. treasury dry.

Tamez was not at court today in Brownsville. She is in Albuquerque attending a conference with other concerned landowners and lawyers who are strategizing on how to fight the border wall’s construction. No word yet on what she plans to do next and whether Hanen’s ruling can be challenged in court.

Updated

The North Central Texas Fusion System, a terror-prevention intelligence center run by Collin County, is ending its weekly “Prevention Awareness Bulletins,” reports the Collin County Observer. We write about the Fusion Center in the latest issue of the magazine. The Fusion Center attracted national attention in February when one of its bulletins - an amalgam of bizarre conspiracy theories involving Islamo-lobbyists and antiwar groups - surfaced. The memo was authored by Dr. Bob Johnson, the architect and operator of the Fusion Center and son of Plano Congressman Sam Johnson.

Critics worried that Dr. Bob’s fear-mongering would encourage cops to target innocent people based on dubious profiling. On the other hand, some sources said that law enforcement officials considered the Fusion Center product worthless. In any case, this week’s bulletin (.pdf) will apparently be the last.

Dear Customer:

The North Central Texas Fusion Center is assessing how to prioritize our resources to provide value-added analytical products to our partners in the homeland security, law enforcement, fire, emergency management, public health, medical, and private security communities. Rather than solely providing information, we strive to disseminate threat-driven intelligence, information that is compiled, analyzed and disseminated to help predict, prevent, and respond to all hazards threatening the North Central Texas region.

In prioritizing our resources, we also understand that you must prioritize your limited time. Therefore, we will no longer be sending weekly bulletins. However, we will continue to send periodic updates, resources, information and analysis that we believe to be of value to you.

Update: I think we now know the true reason for the bulletins’ demise: It was embarrassing the Department of Homeland Security and Congress.

On Wednesday, the Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee held a hearing entitled “The Future of Fusion Centers: Potential Promise and Dangers.” Representing the six Texas fusion centers, including the North Central Texas Fusion System, was John Bateman, the assistant commander of the bureau on information analysis. Bateman was representing

Here’s the transcript:

REP. JANE HARMAN (D-California): Thank you very much.

Let me, finally, address a question to you, Mr. Riegle. This op- ed spends a lot of time on the problems with a bulletin that was issued by the North Central Texas Fusion System.

Mr. Bateman, you also might want to comment.

Could you tell me what DHS’s response was to this bulletin and what happened?

ROBERT RIEGLE [in charge of DHS’ fusion efforts]: We took immediate and aggressive response to the bulletin. You’ll get more data on that in the next panel. But we immediately sent a team of civil liberties and civil rights experts down to the state of Texas to work directly with the center.

This included advocates from the Muslim-American community n the United States of America. We also then immediately altered the directors’ meeting at the national conference to emphasize the importance of this and went over this particular oversight error as aggressively as we possibly could. And I’ll leave it at that to allow Mr. Bateman some time to respond.

REP. HARMAN: Fine. Mr. Bateman, you have 33 seconds.

MR. BATEMAN: Thank you. Chief Kelley Stone of the North Central Texas Fusion System took responsibility for this. He met with Rob Riegle and their staff. They’re implemented new review and editing policies, and they’ve met with people and are retraining everyone in the area of privacy and civil liberties. And I would disagree with Mr. Riegle’s assertion that it was aggressive. I would say it was responsible, but I don’t think anybody viewed it as an aggressive response.

David Gersten, with DHS’ Office for Civil RIghts and Civil Liberties, told Congressional Quarterly that they made the North Central Texas Fusion System an example of “what not to do.”

“We brought the subject up at the National Fusion Center Conference and trained [DHS analysts] using that product as a demonstration of what not to do,” said Gersten. “We have taken that even further to provide some assurances to other states that we will continue to monitor products as they come out.”

I should note, however, that the committee didn’t ask a single question about any other aspect of the Fusion System, such as Dr. Bob’s no-bid contracts or his data mining operation.

Update II below
Updated below

A bizarre, conspiracy-laden memo [.doc] sent to law enforcement personnel last week warns of threats to Texas from Muslim organizations and anti-war groups. It calls on “law enforcement officers to report these type of activities to identify potential underlying trends emerging in the North Central region.”

We’re trying to learn more about which law enforcement agencies received the bulletin - and how seriously they take it.

The bulletin - stamped “For Official Use Only” but leaked to this Web site yesterday - was apparently issued last Thursday by the North Central Texas Fusion System, one of a number of post-9/11 centers designed to consolidate and share intelligence with law enforcement agencies.

The Fusion Center has an email address for “report[ing] suspicious North Central Texas incidents or observations to the Fusion System Analyst.” Civil liberties groups and Muslim organizations have worried that the Fusion Centers are operating with little oversight and may be drifting into counter-terrorism initiatives that they’re not qualified for.

The ACLU is calling the memo the “latest example of inappropriate police intelligence operations targeting political, religious and social activists for investigation.”

Here’s a choice passage from the bulletin:

Middle Eastern Terrorist groups and their supporting organizations have been successful in gaining support for Islamic goals in the United States and providing an environment for terrorist organizations to flourish. A number of organizations in the U.S. have been lobbying Islamic-based issues for many years. These lobbying efforts have turned public and political support towards radical goals such as Shariah law and support of terrorist military action against Western nations. Add to this the Hezbollah training of Mexican Drug Cartel members on bomb making techniques; the threats to Texas are significant.

The bulletin singles out certain organizations: the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim advocacy group; the International Action Center, a left-wing organization founded by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark; and the anti-war group ANSWER.

The bulletin is riddled with John Birch Society-ish statements. “Tolerance is growing in more formal areas,” it warns at one point. As an example, the memo cites an “Islamic Finance 101″ conference held by the Department of Treasury. The document cites one Christopher Holton of the right-wing Center for Security Policy, founded by Frank Gaffney, as calling Islamic finance a “modern-day Trojan horse.” The document goes on to say, “A Houston bank now offers Islamic Financing for home loans.”

Scary. But not as scary as the reports of “Islamic radicalization.”

Islamic radicalization of have been [sic] reported by such groups as Hizb-ut-Tahir who have a goal of overthrowing governments and replacing them with a caliph. They take advantage of growing tolerance in the U.S. Some of their marketing schemes have included hip hop fashion boutiques, hip hop bands, use of online social networks, use of video sharing networks, chat forums and blogs. They have been especially active in California, New York, Wisconsin, and Chicago. They target universities for recruitment.

If it seems like this “Prevention Awareness Bulletin” was culled from conspiracy-prone right-wing Internet Web sites that’s because, apparently, it was. A source list includes HumanEvents.com, FamilySecurityMatters.org, FrontPagemag.com and the Christian Broadcasting Network, as well as more mainstream sources such as the Anti-Defamation League and (using “mainstream” loosely) the Washington Times.

The meta-data of the Word document lists one “James R. Johnson” as the author of the document. Johnson is the son of Congressman Sam Johnson, Republican from Plano. James (Bob) Johnson owns, with his wife Anita Miller, ADB Consulting LLC, which received a contract from Collin County to design the Fusion System. A cached copy of Johnson’s personal Web site says he has “worked in National Intelligence for over 20 years.” Both Miller and Johnson’s email addresses are listed on the contact section of the Fusion Center’s Web site.

Calls to Kelley Stone, the Director of Homeland Security for Collin County, were not returned today. Emails to Miller and Johnson have not been returned. We will update this post if and when we hear back from them.

Update: The Washington Times source used in the bulletin is actually a downright whacky op-ed by Frank Gaffney in which he worries that Treasury “is now in a position to impose its embrace of Shariah on the U.S. financial sector.” Oh, and guess what, the Bush Treasury Department held seminars on Islamic finance. They even had an Islamic Finance Scholar in Residence, a professor at Rice U.

And what is this scary thing called Islamic Finance? According to Forbes.com: “In spirit, Islamic finance seeks to promote social justice by banning exploitative practices. In reality, this boils down to a set of prohibitions–on paying interest, on gambling with derivatives and options, and on investing in firms that make pornography or pork.” That thing about not gambling on derivatives: C-R-A-Z-Y.

Update II: Tim Wyatt, a spokesman for Collin County, which runs the Fusion System, downplayed the bulletin to the Observer today while admitting that it wasn’t terribly well-informed.

Wyatt described the weekly bulletin as a “clipping service” that goes out to 2,900 public health and safety personnel in North Texas, including fire marshals, police officers, firefighters, and health departments.

“The bulletin didn’t direct any agency to investigate or target anybody,” he said. “I don’t think fire marshals in North Texas are out hunting for radical terrorists.”

What about that line at the end that says “it is imperative for law enforcement officers to report these types of activities”?

“I think it’s a bad editing job,” said Wyatt. “What we’re going to do is advise that next time someone take a little closer read of how they’re phrasing the thing because nobody intended it to be a call to investigate or target anybody. The bulletin is nothing other than what it says – a prevention awareness bulletin.”

Apparently, James Johnson - son of Congressman Samuel Johnson, the Republican who represents Collin County - did write the bulletin. Wyatt could not immediately say what qualified Johnson to opine on terror threats to North Texas or why he relied exclusively on Web sites promoting right-wing conspiracy theories.

Wyatt did say that Collin County’s Department of Homeland Security - does everyone have a DHS now?! - will take a closer look at the sources and how Johnson crafted the document.

Absurd, funny, or scary, the larger lesson in all this is that Fusion Centers have had very little public scrutiny. They operate with a considerable amount of autonomy and some clearly have a Keystone Kop element to them.