By
Janice Kephart,
April 22, 2009
Maryland Motor Vehicle Administrator John Kuo and Transportation Secretary John Porcari testified jointly in Annapolis on December 16, 2008, that a lawful status requirement for driver’s licenses was necessary in Maryland, and asked for an emergency response by the legislature. I blogged at the time about the growing Maryland discomfort with their own policies in What Illegal Immigration Has Got to Do with Driver Licenses: Maryland’s Lament. Read more...
By
Janice Kephart,
April 20, 2009
The National Governors Association (NGA) is continuing to negotiate its bill called PASS ID Act (analyzed in my April 6, 2009 Backgrounder "The Appearance of Security: REAL ID Final Regulations vs. PASS ID Act of 2009"). The March 27, 2009 bill draft I analyzed continues to be honed, with the goal of introducing it (so I'm told) in conjunction with the National Conference of State Legislatures' Spring Forums in Washington, D.C., April 22-25, 2009. Read more...
By
Janice Kephart,
March 26, 2009
Secure Document World Conference Keynote Presentation Highlights
There is no doubt that there has been a sea change in priorities in the US in the past year due to a severe down turn in the world economy and a new President that disagrees with much of the past administration’s programs and policies. While there remains a ‘no comment’ on much of the Bush administration work on secure documents and IDs, one thing is clear: we cannot understand where the US needs to be in the area of secure documents without looking at where we have been. In order to gain a better perspective on where we should go, I recently interviewed Former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, Former DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker, and DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Kathy Kraninger. Read more...
By
Janice Kephart,
March 19, 2009
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has a new word for terrorism: "man-caused disasters." Not only that, but in her March 16, 2009, interview with German press, she states that her job is to help prepare for risks from man-caused disasters.
So let me get this straight.
The Department of Homeland Security is tasked by the law that created it with a "primary mission to: Read more...
By
Janice Kephart,
March 8, 2009
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data from the first seven weeks of 2009 suggest that by the end of this year, E-Verify use will have grown 442 percent since 2007.
Employers send queries to the free, online E-Verify system to determine the work-eligibility of new hires. As of the third week in February, online queries for 2009 were already approaching 3 million, almost half the 6.6 million queries for all of 2008, a number that was itself more than double the 2007 use of E-Verify. Read more...
By
Janice Kephart,
February 11, 2009
Today former INS Commissioner Doris Meissner emphatically endorsed E-Verify in a report from the Migration Policy Institute, Taking Stock and Correcting Course, coming as Sen. Sessions (R-AL) failed to get an E-Verify reauthorization amendment into the Senate "stimulus" package yesterday. Read more...
By
Janice Kephart,
December 30, 2008
View Related Blogs and Videos
Last week saw a big win for prosecutors and the FBI with the conviction of three illegal immigrant brothers and two permanent legal residents for the plot to commit a terrorist attack against military personnel at Fort Dix. The convictions for conspiring to kill military personnel (but acquitted of attempted murder) indicate that aggressive pursuit of terrorist plots before they happen can result in convictions. Yet no one is talking about the fact that informants were able to infiltrate the group of five in part because they were able to present the conspirators with something most of them didn’t have – a legal form of U.S. identification. Read more...
By
Janice Kephart,
December 17, 2008
View Related Blogs and Videos
In 1993, Tina Turner lamented about love in What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Fifteen years later, in 2008, Maryland is publicly lamenting about the effect of permitting illegal immigrants to get driver licenses. A bit tongue in cheek—please—Maryland’s lyric might go something like this: Oh what’s illegal immigration got to do, got to do with driver licenses? Read more...
By
Janice Kephart,
October 15, 2008
On September 9, 2008, Manoj Kargudri, a 36-year-old Indian national, was arraigned in U.S. District Court in San Antonio on charges of visa and immigration fraud. Considered a flight risk, he was held pending trial. Kargudri was not just another run-of-the-mill illegal immigration case. This one had patterns of terrorist travel in it, taking advantage of vulnerabilities in U.S. border systems for the purpose of entering and embedding in the United States. Read more...
By
Janice Kephart,
August 26, 2008
I have been using E Verify for over 3 years. It takes away all of the guess work in determining if documents presented are valid or not. Being close to the border you would be surprised at the amount of fake IDs that look real until they are run through the program. For the first time in my 20+ years in HR I am comfortable in knowing that we are hiring only employees who are authorized to work in the United States.
Ginny Priborsky, online comment in response to "E-Verify: Is it about to die?," HR Morning, July 11, 2008
The E-Verify program is well on its way to fixing a 20-year-old problem of determining legal employment eligibility in a manner employers can support. (The quote above is an endorsement from an end-user.) Read more...
By
Janice Kephart,
August 8, 2008
Last week I wrote about the top ten reasons why a heist of 3,000 blank UK e-passports matters. In that piece, I laid out the many reasons why this heist is a concern to the US, mostly stemming from how these e-passports – even assuming the blank chips that hold biographical and biometric data are not susceptible to counterfeit – still present multiple opportunities for undercover terrorist travel and identity theft. Read more...
By
Janice Kephart,
July 30, 2008
The UK Guardian report today of an old-fashioned criminal heist of a van carrying 3,000 just-printed blank UK passports and "vignettes" (used for visa inserts) from Oldham, England (just outside of Manchester) southwest to London should give us pause here in the United States. UK law enforcement says these passports have a street value of about $5 million, or over $3,000 each. Read more...
By
Janice Kephart,
July 22, 2008
Two weeks ago, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Ombudsman released his 2008 Annual Report. Today the Ombudsman, Michael Dougherty, was at the Heritage Foundation with former INS Commissioner Doris Meissner and Heritage's James Carafano discussing the report's findings. Read more...
