U.S. Department of Homeland Security

$4 Million Worth Of Marijuana Found On Santa Barbara County Beach

Despite their taste in verdant herbal remedies, smugglers did not have the luck of the green on St. Patrick's Day. Authorities in Santa Barbara said they found and seized their $4 million stash on Arroyo Camada Beach early Sunday morning. The weed weighed 2,000 pounds:

Pez Abrahams: Valley Doctor Accused Of Sexual Attack On Patient

A San Fernando Valley doctor was in scalding hot water today after state medical officials announced his arrest for allegedly sexually attacking a patient while he was performing work for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Pez Abrahams, whose family practice and plastic surgery office ... More >>

Illegal Immigrants Hit The Streets As ICE Fears Sequester Cuts; Republicans Pissed

In what feels to us like a middle finger to those Republicans cheering on draconian "sequester" cuts to the federal budget following a congressional impasse, the Department of Homeland Security says undocumented immigrants are being released from detention centers across America. The action is appa ... More >>

Marijuana Warehouse That Provided Dispensaries With Weed Busted By LAPD

A nearly $4-million-month marijuana operation that supplied dispensaries near and far was busted by the LAPD, the department alleged today. Narcotics officers, with the help of U.S. Homeland Security gang agents, served a search warrant at a warehouse about 11 a.m. yesterday and allegedly discovere ... More >>

TRUST Act Passes California Senate: Bill Would Override 'Secure Communities,' Protect Illegal Immigrants From Deportation

The most liberal immigration legislation since California's DREAM Act just passed the state Senate 21-13 -- and it has a good chance of making its way through the Assembly and the governor's office, as well. The TRUST Act, otherwise known as the Anti-Arizona Act, would more or less override the fed ... More >>

U.S. Homeland Security May Permit Gay Couples to Go Through Customs Together

It's not as infamous a gay-rights fight as marriage or hospital visitation, but discrimination against same-sex couples at our nation's border crossings can be just as offensive and cumbersome. As it stands, gay couples must file separate Customs forms when re-entering America. If they have childre ... More >>

Cindy Reyna, Model and UC Santa Barbara Student, Faces Deportation

Updated at the bottom: She was arrested on suspicion of DUI. First posted at 1:58 p.m. Immigrants' rights activists are coming to the aid of Cindy Reyna, a UC Santa Barbara student and sometime model who they say was arrested and now faces deportation despite being a potential DREAM Act student. T ... More >>

Massive LAPD Security Detail at Oscars Included Bomb-Squad Robot, Forklift

The Academy Awards in the heart of Hollywood make the perfect target for a terrorist. (Or an Occupier.) They're the ultimate symbol of Western culture, celebrating billion-dollar blockbusters and caught up in a media frenzy of nip slips/gown slits. Of this, the LAPD is well aware. Thus the massive ... More >>

Cacophony Society Prankster Group Gets New Exhibit and Documentary

Tanya Saracho's El Nogalar: Chekhov Set in the Mexican Drug Wars

Though Tanya Saracho is 35 and has lived in the United States since she was 12, she still isn't a citizen, holding only a green card. Deeply grateful to the United States for the life she's lived here so far, she finds the citizenship process now administered by the Department of Homeland Security a ... More >>

Michael Vincent Pree: Suspect Pimped, Sexually Assaulted Girl Under 12, LAPD Says

Cops over the weekend said they arrested a 23-year-old who put a young girl under the age of 12 into prostitution and sexually assaulted her. The suspect was ID'd as Michael Vincent Pree, who was arrested at his L.A. home Wednesday by the Innocence Lost Task Force, according to the LAPD. Here's wh ... More >>

Occupy LA Plans to 'Occupy ICE' at Downtown Federal Building: Immigrant Crackdowns to be Protested

​Occupy L.A.'s City Hall encampment might be a thing of the past, but the occupiers continue to return to their Civic Center home for "general assembly" meetings and protests. Today, demonstrators warn, the tents will return to the neighborhood, this time in front of the downtown federal buil ... More >>

Facebook Friends, Change.org Rally to Prevent Deportation of Man They Don't Even Know

An L.A. college student organized an online campaign to prevent a man she never meant from being deported ... and it worked, at least according to the group change.org. Jackie Mahendra, director of the org's immigrants rights campaign, told the Weekly today that L.A.'s own Jamie Alegre saw via Face ... More >>

Is the War on Food Terror Useless?

Associated PressThis California farmer was given money from the Department of Homeland Security to buy a lock for his dairy barn.​ A report released by the Associated Press yesterday, September 13th, found that the post-9/11 plan to protect the American food supply is mostly ineffective and u ... More >>

Ecstasy Trade: 60 Percent More E Comes From Canada Than Mexico; Asian Drug Gangs Getting Smarter

Cuteload from Canada.​Did you know that 1,460 pounds of ecstasy were confiscated by agents at the northern U.S. border between 2005 and 2009? Compare that to 24 measly pounds at the Mexican border -- barely enough for one day at the Electric Daisy Carnival -- despite hundreds of thousands of d ... More >>

Ass, Cash Used by Mexican Cartels to Move Grass Past U.S. Border Agents

U.S. Border agents' new motto?​The U.S.-Mexico border has been shored up with thousands of new agents in what appears to us to be the Obama administration's attempts (and Bush's before that) to get right wingers to STFU when it comes to immigration enforcement. While it might have been a good ... More >>

Arizona Border Fence: In Effort to Attract Internet Donors, State Senator Russell Pearce Spews False Immigrant Crime Statistics

Senator Russell Pearce​Annnd... Arizona's anti-immigration campaign hurtles still further into red-state ridiculousness. This morning, Governor Jan Brewer announced her latest, greatest battle plan in the war against illegal border-crossers: collect Internet donations to build a massive fence ... More >>

L.A. County Economy Would Shrink by More Than $100 Billion If All Illegal Immigrants Were Deported, Says UCLA Report

MPR NewsViolent criminals stealing jobs in Glendale​Awesome: L.A. County just got the Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda treatment. The UCLA Chicano-studies professor released a controversial study back in March, in which he weighed the effects of granting all Arizona's illegal immigrants citizenship agains ... More >>

UPS Delivery-Guy-As-Terrorist Hoax Dupes LAPD, LA Weekly

Delivering fear.​Oops. We fell for it too. But an LA Weekly post about a purported U.S. Department of Homeland Security warning about fake UPS delivery men and women was only up for a few minutes before we saw that the LAPD West Valley Division, which first published the hoax on its Nixle acco ... More >>

Terrorist Dry Run at Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Complex in Southern California? Three Middle Eastern Men Try to Drive on Base

The Daily MailAhmad Rahmani Naeem, Vahik Petrossian and Sengekdi Avanosian.​A scary situation unfolded at Southern California's Camp Pendleton, one of the nation's largest military bases, over the weekend. Marine Corps officials are downplaying the events, but what happened at the San Diego ... More >>

California Immigrants and Job Seekers Will Have to Wait to Use Federal Government's New Employment Eligibility Website

​People living in California may have to wait until April 2012 to use the federal government's new website that allows users to check on their own employment eligibility. The new program, called E-Verify Self Check, was launched Monday and for the first time ever enables potential workers to see ... More >>

Justin Bieber Accidentally Violates Own Copyright, and Other Insane Tales of the Ongoing Intellectual Property Crackdown

What do a Texas cheerleader, a parking lot attendant, OnSmash.com, and the founders of Pirate Bay have in common? If you guessed "alleged criminals" you are correct!

Einstürzende Neubauten vs US Homeland Security: Tour Cancelled Due to Visa SNAFU

Just before noon this afternoon Einstürzende Neubauten announced the cancellation of their North American thirtieth anniversary shows, including an appearance at the Music Box December 2 and intimate show at the Echoplex December 3.  Don't hold your breath for them to reschedule.   The press re ... More >>

"Coach" Scarves From Counterfeit Capital Of The World Detained At Los Angeles Seaport By Homeland Security Heroes

Department of Homeland Security​Well-dressed patriots rejoiced and broke consumer whores wept this morning, when a giant shipment of 24,000 "Coach" scarves from China was stopped in its tracks at the Los Angeles/Long Beach Seaport. With hound-like intuition, Customs and Border Protection offi ... More >>

Ali Ahmad Asseri, Gay Saudi Official In L.A., Seeks Asylum, Says He Could Be Killed If Returned To His Homeland

Google Maps​A Saudi diplomat based in Los Angeles has asked the United States for political asylum because he is gay and calls a Jewish woman friend, NBC News reported this week. Ali Ahmad Asseri was identified as the first secretary of Saudi Arabia's consulate on Sawtelle Boulevard in West L. ... More >>

DJ Kutmah: the Deported

Artist opens up about his harrowing expulsion from the place he calls home

EXCLUSIVE: First Interview with LA DJ Kutmah after His Controversial Deportation

​ Two months ago, news broke that the popular Dublab and Low End Theory-affiliated DJ, Justin "Kutmah" McNulty had been detained by Department of Homeland Security authorities for failing to honor a voluntary deportation notice that he had signed over a decade earlier. The arrest triggered a ... More >>

Number Of Illegal Immigrants Decreased By One Million Since 2007

​The number of illegal immigrants in the United States was down about 800,000 last year compared to 2008, reportedly as a result of the recession and fewer job opportunities. The decrease from 11.6 million undocumented workers in 2008 to 10.8 million in 2009 was reported by the U.S. Department ... More >>

Court Rejects Challenge Of LAPD's Immigrant-Arrests Policy

​A California appeals court this week rejected a conservative group's challenge of the Los Angeles Police Department's policy when it comes to enforcement immigration law. The department makes note of immigrants arrested on suspicion of certain drug offenses and transfers the information to th ... More >>

LAX Gets $150 Million Taxpayer Dollars For ... Improved Baggage Screening

LAX​The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has secured $150 million in taxpayer dollars to speed up baggage screening at LAX, officials announced Monday.That's a lot of cash for an automated, in-line baggage screening process. Put it this way: ... More >>

Settlement in Federal Immigrant Jail Suit

Most Angelenos never see the Brezhnevian Federal Building on Los Angeles Street. Fewer still have had a reason to brave the long security line to get inside, much less to visit its underground detention center. The latter's six holding pens, known, in affectionate governmentspeak as "B-18," are wher ... More >>

L.A.'s Homeleand Security Spending Spree

In 2004 the L.A. Weekly examined the free-spending ways of the Department of Homeland Security, calling DHS largesse to academia and local law enforcement agencies "a 21st-century New Deal for the military-industrial complex." Now, on the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a report is ... More >>

TSA, LAX: Dell's Lost Laptop Figures Do Not Compute

Last week L.A. Daily quoted findings from "Airport Insecurity: The Case of Missing & Lost Laptops," an independent survey conducted in 2008 by the Ponemon Institute for Dell Inc., one of the nation's leading computer manufacturers. Based on a methodology that surveyed 106 U.S. airports and inter ... More >>

Swine Flu Notes: Where's the Pork?

We're one week into L.A.'s chapter of the swine flu pandemic/panic and already people are asking, "Where's the pork?" Raised on bio-disaster movies and braced for the worst upon hearing of Mexico's initial death toll, Angelenos were expecting (not, I should stress, hoping) to see bodies in the stree ... More >>

Mr. Orwell, Meet B-18: ACLU Sues Government Over Basement Holding Pens

The U.S. Federal Building at 300 N. Los Angeles Street is one of downtown's uglier edifices -- a gray, Brezhnevian block of barricaded concrete that houses a host of government bureaucracies, including the U.S. immigration courts. Visitors entering the lobby little suspect, however, that just below ... More >>

Morning Sixpack: A News Roundup

Slain Pardo Victim Now a Deadbeat Renter Death may take a holiday, but not the landlord, as relatives of Alice Ortiz have discovered, according to an L.A. Daily News story. Ortiz was among nine Covina family members murdered by Bruce Pardo on Christmas Eve and now that the mourning's over, Ortiz's l ... More >>

Culturally Unique: Actors' Equity Goes Soviet on UCLA Live

Plus, the Civilians' This Beautiful City reviewed

Secure Borders? Try Fenced In

With $860 million spending sprees, high-tech surveillance towers that don't work and Operation Streamline show trials, it's still the same old catch-and-release game

Remember the Immigrant-Rights Movement?

The case of Elvira Arellano inspires L.A. organizers

Good Night and Good Luck

A baker’s dozen of highlights from a year of meta-media madness

Good Night, and Good Luck

A baker’s dozen of highlights from a year of meta-media madness

How Not to Manage a Crisis — The Timeline

And Then There Was a Knock

The strange detention of a Hindu Afghan grandfather and his wife

All the President’s Problems

A blundering start to the second term

University of Fear

How the Department of Homeland Security is becoming a big man on campus

Coffee, Tea or Handcuffs?

An Australian journalist gets a taste of Department of Homeland Security hospitality

Homeland Insecurity

American Magic-al Mystery Tour

Exiled in Texas

Bush turns on the Democrat who introduced him to the nation

Shrieking in Cyberspace

Relax. Your computer’s fine. We’re only blowing billions on an overhyped terror threat

Politics of Dung

Simon smells questions he can’t answer on farm beat; Davis prepares to shovel dirt