Concertina wire is installed along the banks of the Rio Grande River as part of “Operation Lone Star,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security mission.

From The Center Square

By Bethany Blankley

Nine months after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General expressed alarm that under the Biden administration, DHS agencies couldn’t locate where illegal foreign nationals were after they released them into the U.S., ongoing problems persist and terrorism threats are heightened.

Last September, the DHS OIG released a redacted report stating that DHS “does not have assurance that all migrants can be located once they are released into the United States.”

It conducted an audit over a 17-month period when DHS released more than 1.3 million foreign nationals into the U.S. after they illegally entered through the southwest border.

Of the 981,671 Border Patrol records evaluated from March 2021 through August 2022, addresses for more than 177,000 foreign nationals, or nearly 20%, “were either missing, invalid for delivery, or not legitimate residential locations,” it found.

The OIG also found that during this period, Border Patrol agents released 430,000 illegal foreign nationals into the U.S. on their own recognizance with Notice to Appear documents to go before an immigration judge. They released nearly 95,000 with Notice to Report documents to go to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office and more than 318,000 through a new Parole Plus Alternatives to Detention (Parole + ATD) program.

Under the Biden administration, instead of being processed for removal, foreign nationals deemed inadmissible were granted Parole + ATD and released into the U.S. They were also tracked with electronic devices either through wearing ankle bracelets or being given smartphones “intended to ensure compliance with release conditions, court hearings, and final orders of removal,” the report notes.

Prior to releasing them, federal agents are required to vet them to ensure they don’t have a criminal record and aren’t connected to countries of foreign concern or terrorist organizations. Federal agents are also required to obtain an address of where they are going in order to enforce federal immigration law.

The OIG found that DHS agencies had “limited ability” to accurately and effectively track them. Border Patrol “cannot always obtain and does not always record migrant addresses” and ICE “does not always validate migrant addresses prior to their release.”

Border Patrol agents didn’t accurately and effectively capture valid addresses, the report notes, because they were inundated with large influxes of people arriving at the border and because of “limited coordination with ICE and its limited authority to administer compliance with address requirements.” The audit found that “ICE also did not have adequate resources to validate and analyze migrants’ post-release addresses.”

ICE is statutorily required to enforce federal immigration law, specifically detaining and removing inadmissibles. “ICE must be able to locate migrants to enforce immigration laws, including to arrest or remove individuals who are considered potential threats to national security,” the OIG said. “The notable percentage of missing, invalid for delivery, or duplicate addresses on file means DHS may not be able to locate migrants following their release into the United States. As the Department continues to apprehend and release tens of thousands of migrants each month, valid post-release addresses are essential.”

Prior to this audit, the OIG found that DHS processes allowed known or suspected terrorist to illegally enter the U.S. and “potentially threaten national security and public safety.”

The report was released nearly 22 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The terrorist attacks prompted the creation of DHS, consolidating several federal agencies all mandated to protect Americans and prevent another terrorist attack from occurring.

Within the last nine months, the OIG continued to report on DHS failures and authorities nationwide have issued heightened terrorist warnings.

One OIG audit found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) weren’t effectively screening asylum seekers – meaning they didn’t know who they were releasing into the country.

Another OIG report found that CBP and ICE weren’t detaining and removing inadmissables arriving at a major international airport – with 44% flagged for removal not showing up for their removal flights because federal agents had released them.

Another OIG audit found that DHS, CBP, USCIS and ICE agents didn’t properly vet or resolve derogatory information for tens of thousands of Afghans released into the U.S. After the Biden administration pulled U.S. forces out of Afghanistan in August 2021, 97,000 Afghans were brought to the U.S. Among them, 77,000, or 79%, were granted humanitarian parole into the U.S. allowing them to stay for two years.

The OIG expressed alarm about DHS not having a process “for monitoring parole expiration” after the two-year period ended in August 2023, meaning no plans were in place to remove them.

As numerous officials have warned a terrorist attack on U.S. soil is imminent and members of Congress have demanded answers, an unprecedented estimated 12 million people from over 150 countries have illegally entered the U.S. since the president has been in office.

Julian Assange, Embassy Of Ecuador on May 19, 2017, in London, England

From LifeSiteNews

By Andreas Wailzer

Following a 5-year solitary incarceration, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was released from a London prison after taking a plea deal with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding the publication of classified information online.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been released from prison after agreeing to a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department.

On Monday, the high-profile journalist was released from prison after agreeing to a deal in which he plead guilty for his involvement in publishing classified information received from a whistleblower working inside the U.S. government.

As CNN reported, Assange will receive a 62-month prison sentence according to the terms of the agreements. The sentence equals the time he spent in the high-security prison Belmarsh near London. The time served will be credited toward his sentence, allowing Assange to leave prison immediately and return to his native Australia.

“Julian Assange is free,” WikiLeaks announced in its statement posted on X, formerly Twitter. “He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.”

“This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organizers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations. This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalized. We will provide more information as soon as possible.”

“After more than five years in a 2×3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars,” the statement continued, adding that “WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people’s right to know.”

Assange is expected to officially plead guilty in a court in the Northern Mariana Islands on Wednesday, a U.S. territory located in the Pacific Ocean relatively close to Assange’s native Australia.

Assange faced life in prison in the U.S. for 17 counts of espionage and one charge of computer misuse related to the publication of millions of classified documents by WikiLeaks.

Assange’s legal battle began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified documents regarding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including a video that showed a U.S. military helicopter killing several civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad, Iraq. The information was provided by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. From 2012 to 2019, Assange lived in the Ecuadorian embassy in London under asylum status. After he was arrested by Metropolitan police in 2019 under an extradition warrant from the U.S. government, Assange was imprisoned at Belmarsh, a high-security prison close to London, where he has been held in solitary confinement up until Monday.

According to sources cited by CNN, officials at the Justice Department and the FBI opposed any deal that did not include a guilty plea to a felony by Assange.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald warned of the danger of Assange pleading guilty to a felony for publishing classified information, which, in the eyes of many, was not a crime but a service to society, namely providing information showing that governments are deceiving their citizens.

“I never believed that the Biden administration actually wanted to bring Julian Assange onto American soil to stand trial,” Greenwald said. “Imagine the spectacle that it would have created as Biden heads into an election.”

It would put on Joe Biden’s record that he would be the first American president in history to preside over the imprisonment, not of a source who leaked information, but of someone who published classified information, which every newspaper in the United States does on a regular basis…

The goal of… keeping him in prison was to crush Julian Assange physically and mentally, and they succeeded in doing that…

They wanted to break Assange and simultaneously send a message to any future Assanges that ‘We will ruin your life if you publish our secrets.’

Drawing parallels to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden not being allowed to return to the U.S., Greenwald said, “It is a deterrent message to keep the ability to hide their own crimes through secrecy, immune from the one vulnerability that they have which is that brave people inside the government leak that information to the public or through the media and reveal what it is they are doing.”