Latest news with #CBP
Time of India
4 hours ago
- Politics
- Time of India
New warning for green card holders in US: Always carry THIS at all times with you, CBP reminds
CBP issued a reminder to Green Card holders asking them to always carry the document with them. The Customs and Border Police issued an important reminder the all green card holders that they have to carry at all times with them the proof of their alien registration as mandated by the law. "Failing to do so can lead to a misdemeanor and fines if you are stopped by federal law enforcement," the reminder issued Wednesday said. This is not a new law and non-citizens are required to carry proof of their legal status in the US always but the Trump administration's reminder shows that the crackdown on green card holders, lawful permanent residents, will continue and just because they are legally residing in the country, it does not mean they will not be punished. The State Department earlier made it clear that permanent residents can also be deported if they are found flouting laws. — CBP (@CBP) What are Alien Registration Documents ? Alien Registration Number (A-Number) This is a unique 7–9 digit number assigned to non-citizens by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). This is used to track immigration records, applications, and status. This commonly starts with an 'A'. Green Card Officially known as Form I-551, this is issued to lawful permanent residents. The Donald Trump administration has broken the conception that Green Card holders can't be arrested and their citizenship can't be revoked. A Green Card includes a photo, the A-number, category of admission and expiry date. This is proof of the right to live and work in the US permanently. Employment Authorization Document Form I-7666 is also known as a work permit which is issued to non-citizens who are temporarily authorized to work. This contains the A number, photo and validity dates. Arrival-departure record I-94 documents a non-citizen's entry and authorized stay. This document includes the A-number for certain visa holders. This is issued at ports of entry or online for air travelers. Under US immigration law, most non-citizens over age 14 who stay in the U.S. for more than 30 days must carry their alien registration documentation at all times.
The Intercept
5 hours ago
- Business
- The Intercept
Border Patrol Wants Advanced AI to Spy on American Cities
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, flush with billions in new funding, is seeking 'advanced AI' technologies to surveil urban residential areas, increasingly sophisticated autonomous systems, and even the ability to see through walls. A CBP presentation for an 'Industry Day' summit with private sector vendors, obtained by The Intercept, lays out a detailed wish list of tech CBP hopes to purchase, like satellite connectivity for surveillance towers along the border and improved radio communications. But it also shows that state-of-the-art, AI-augmented surveillance technologies will be central to the Trump administration's anti-immigrant campaign, which will extend deep into the interior of the North American continent, hundreds of miles from international borders as commonly understood. The recent passage of Trump's sprawling flagship legislation funnels tens of billions of dollars to the Department of Homeland Security. While much of that funding will go to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to bolster the administration's arrest and deportation operations, a great deal is earmarked to purchase new technology and equipment for federal offices tasked with preventing immigrants from arriving in the first place: Customs and Border Protection, which administers the country's border surveillance apparatus, and its subsidiary, the U.S. Border Patrol. One page of the presentation, describing the wishlist of Border Patrol's Law Enforcement Operations Division, says the agency needs 'Advanced AI to identify and track suspicious activity in urban environment [sic],' citing the 'challenges' posed by 'Dense residential areas.' What's considered 'suspicious activity' is left unmentioned. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to questions posed about the slides by The Intercept. A slide from the CBP presentation showing the wishlist for the Coastal Area of Responsibility. Screenshot from CBP Presentation The reference to AI-aided urban surveillance appears on a page dedicated to the operational needs of Border Patrol's 'Coastal AOR,' or area of responsibility, encompassing the entire southeast of the United States, from Kentucky to Florida. A page describing the 'Southern AOR,' which includes all of inland Nevada and Oklahoma, similarly states the need for 'Advanced intelligence to identify suspicious patterns' and 'Long-range surveillance' because 'city environments make it difficult to separate normal activity from suspicious activity.' Although the Fourth Amendment provides protection against arbitrary police searches, federal law grants immigration agencies the power to conduct warrantless detentions and searches within 100 miles of the land borders with Canada, Mexico, or the coastline of the United States. This zone includes most of the largest cities in the United States, including Los Angeles, New York, as well as the entirety of Florida. The document mentions no specific surveillance methods or 'advanced AI' tools that might be used in urban environments. Across the Southwest, residents of towns like Nogales and Calexico are already subjected to monitoring from surveillance towers placed in their neighborhoods. A 2014 DHS border surveillance privacy impact assessment warned these towers 'may capture information about individuals or activities that are beyond the scope of CBP's authorities. Video cameras can capture individuals entering places or engaging in activities as they relate to their daily lives because the border includes populated areas,' for example, 'video of an individual entering a doctor's office, attending public rallies, social events or meetings, or associating with other individuals.' Last year, the Government Accountability Office found the DHS tower surveillance program failed six out of six privacy policies designed to prevent such overreach. CBP is also already known to use 'artificial intelligence' tools to ferret out 'suspicious activity,' according to agency documents. A 2024 inventory of DHS AI applications includes the Rapid Tactical Operations Reconnaissance program, or RAPTOR, which 'leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance border security through real-time surveillance and reconnaissance. The AI system processes data from radar, infrared sensors, and video surveillance to detect and track suspicious activities along U.S. borders.' The document's call for urban surveillance reflect the reality of Border Patrol, an agency empowered, despite its name, with broad legal authority to operate throughout the United States. 'Border Patrol's escalating immigration raids and protest crackdowns show us the agency operates heavily in cities, not just remote deserts,' said Spencer Reynolds, a former attorney with the Department of Homeland Security who focused on intelligence matters. 'Day by day, its activities appear less based on suspicion and more reliant on racial and ethnic profiling. References to operations in 'dense residential areas' are alarming in that they potentially signal planning for expanded operations or tracking in American neighborhoods.' Automating immigration enforcement has been a Homeland Security priority for years, as exemplified by the bipartisan push to expand the use of machine learning-based surveillance towers like those sold by arms-maker Anduril Industries across the southern border. 'Autonomous technologies will improve the USBP's ability to detect, identify, and classify potential threats in the operating environment,' according to the agency's 2024 – 2028 strategy document. 'After a threat has been identified and classified, autonomous technology will enable the USBP to track threats in near real-time through an integrated network.' The automation desired by Border Patrol seems to lean heavily on computer vision, a form of machine learning that excels at pattern matching to find objects in the desert that resemble people, cars, or other 'items of interest,' rather than requiring crews of human agents to monitor camera feeds and other sensors around the clock. The Border Patrol presentation includes multiple requests for small drones that incorporate artificial intelligence technologies to aid in the 'detection, tracking, and classification' of targets. A computer system that has analyzed a large number of photographs of trucks driving through the desert can become effective at identifying similar vehicles in the future. But efforts to algorithmically label human behavior as 'suspicious' — an abstract concept compared to 'truck' — based only on its appearance has been criticized by some artificial intelligence scholars and civil libertarians as error-prone, overly subjective if not outright pseudoscientific, and often reliant on ethnic and religious stereotypes. Any effort to apply predictive techniques based on surveillance data from entire urban areas or residential communities would exacerbate these risks of bias and inaccuracy. 'In the best of times, oversight of technology and data at DHS is weak and has allowed profiling, but in recent months the administration has intentionally further undermined DHS accountability,' explained Reynolds, now senior counsel at the Brennan Center's liberty and national security program. 'Artificial intelligence development is opaque, even more so when it relies on private contractors that are unaccountable to the public — like those Border Patrol wants to hire. Injecting AI into an environment full of biased data and black-box intelligence systems will likely only increase risk and further embolden the agency's increasingly aggressive behavior.' 'They're addicted to suspicious activity reporting because they fundamentally believe that their targets do suspicious things.' The desire to hunt 'suspicious' people with 'advanced AI' reflects a longtime ambition at the Department of Homeland Security, Mohammad Tajsar, an attorney at the ACLU of Southern California, told The Intercept. Military and intelligence agencies across the world are increasingly working to use forms of machine learning, often large language models like OpenAI's GPT, to rapidly ingest and analyze varied data sources to find buried trends, threats, and targets — though systemic issues with accuracy remain unsolved. This proposed use case dovetails perfectly with the Homeland Security ethos, Tajsar said. 'They're addicted to suspicious activity reporting because they fundamentally believe that their targets do suspicious things, and that suspicious things can predict criminal behavior,' a notion Tajsar described as a 'fantasy' that 'remains unchallenged despite the complete lack of empiricism to support it.' With the rapid proliferation of technologies billed as artificially intelligent, 'they think that they can bring to bear all of their disparate sources of data using computers, and they see that as a breakthrough in what they've been trying to do for a long, long time.' Read Our Complete Coverage While much of the presentation addresses Border Patrol's wide-ranging surveillance agenda, it also includes information about other departmental tech needs. A slide from the CBP presentation. Screenshot from CBP presentation The Border Patrol Tactical Unit, or BORTAC, exists on paper to execute domestic missions involving terrorism, hostage situations, or other high-risk scenarios. But the unit has become increasingly associated with suppressing dissent and routine deportation raids: In 2020, the Trump administration ordered BORTAC into the streets of Portland to tamp down protests, and the special operations unit has been similarly deployed in Los Angeles this year. According to the presentation, CBP hopes to arm the already heavily militarized BORTAC with the ability to see through walls in order to 'detect people within a structure or rubble.' Another page of the document, listing the agency's 'Subterranean Portfolio,' claims CBP is preparing to lay an additional 2,100 miles of fiber optic cable along the northern and southern border in order to detect passing migrants, as part of a sensor network that also includes seismic, laser, visual, and cellular tracking.
New York Post
18 hours ago
- New York Post
300 pounds of meth hidden in solar panels seized at LAX by Border Patrol
These solar panels need some tweaking. US Customs and Border Protection seized nearly 300 pounds of methamphetamine that was hidden in a shipment of solar panels, the agency announced. Officers intercepted the illicit, faux-green shipment at Los Angeles International Airport on Monday morning — and trolled the unidentified drug traffickers on social media. Advertisement 3 Nearly 300lbs of meth disguised as solar panels were seized by CBP officers at LAX. CPD 'We do this every day. These 'criminal masterminds' never stood a chance,' CBP gloated in a post on Facebook. Photos showed CBP officers pulling apart rectangular, aluminum-lined solar panels in which the massive trove of highly addictive drugs was secreted in tidy bricks. Advertisement The high-energy shipment was destined for New Zealand, officials said, citing 'prior intel.' Officials did not announce any arrests associated with the bust. CBP has made a habit of touting victories with flourish. 3 The shipment, headed for New Zealand, was flagged based on prior intel and intercepted before export. CPD Advertisement 3 Officials did not announce any arrests associated with the bust at LAX. FG/ Last week, the agency mocked an alleged illegal alien who wore an American flag T-shirt when he was apprehended in Buffalo, New York.
American Press
20 hours ago
- Health
- American Press
Cassidy: Fentanyl bill 'one more tool for law enforcement'
U.S. Sen, Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), is chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee. (Special to the American Press) Legislation spearheaded by U.S. Sen. Cassidy was signed by President Donald Trump last week. The Halt All Lethal Trafficking (HALT) Fentanyl Act solidifies the classification of fentanyl-related substances as Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act, which is the category for drugs, substances or chemicals with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Drug overdoses in the United States are predominantly fentanyl-related, contributing to nearly 70 percent of overdose deaths. Fentanyl will be listed at a Schedule 1 drug alongside substances like LSD and cannabis. HALT, which was passed by the U.S. Senate in March, is just 'one more tool for law enforcement to help prevent fentanyl,' Cassidy said during a press briefing on Tuesday. A ceremony for the executive signing of the act was help on Wednesday, July 16. 'During the ceremony, President Trump thanked me, said that this bill is one of the most important things that he will sign this year,' Cassidy said. 'I will agree. One life lost to drug overdoses is too many lives, and we may have as many as 50,000 to 60,000 to 70,000 lives lost annually from fentanyl overdose.' Cassidy thanked Trump in return for addressing the fentanyl epidemic. 'He has worked hard by securing the border, going out to cartels and asking the Chinese to not ship fentanyl precursors to decrease the epidemic. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized 21.9 thousand pounds of fentanyl in 2024. So far this year. As of July 15, CBP has seized 9.2 thousand pounds of fentanyl in 2025. Coca-Cola This week, Coca-Cola announced that the company will expand its product line to include Coca-Cola products made with U.S. Cane Sugar. In the second quarter of 2025 company's report that was released on Tuesday, Coca-Cola said the 'addition is designed to … offer more choices across occasions and preferences.' Cassidy called it a 'great move by President Trump to make America healthier again' that will economically benefit Louisiana through the increased need for sugar. 'Of course, a lot of that sugar is going to come from Louisiana,' he said. 'The cane sugar from Louisiana will be actually healthier than the other type of sugar that they're currently using … and it will obviously give an economic boost to our guys.'
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
'Sensitive' Memo Reveals How Many Border Agents Trump Is Enlisting In Immigration Raids
The Trump administration has diverted roughly 2,000 officers and agents from the country's ports and borders so they can support immigration raids in U.S. cities, according to an internal homeland security memo viewed by HuffPost and labeled 'sensitive.' The shift in money and personnel reflects the White House's desire to juice the number of deportations of people in the country without authorization ― even if it means sapping manpower normally devoted to countering terrorism and drug trafficking along the borders and at ports of entry. The extra bodies have come from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security. CBP includes the U.S. Border Patrol and is a separate entity from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency leading President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown. As of late June, CBP was lending out more than 1,100 of its 19,000 border patrol agents and more than 800 of its 26,000 port officers to ICE, according to the document. CBP doesn't normally take part in immigration enforcement away from the country's ports and borders, at least on a large scale. The agency's core responsibilities are to combat terrorism and transnational crime, safeguard the borders, and facilitate lawful travel and trade, but it is now taking part in what Trump has promised to be 'the largest deportation program in American history.' Gil Kerlikowske, who ran CBP under former President Barack Obama, said redirecting these resources could leave the country vulnerable at its ports and borders. Trump has made a big deal about fentanyl coming into the U.S. from other countries and even used the issue as a justification for his trade war. 'The ports of entry ― that's where the fentanyl comes in,' Kerlikowske said. 'If you've taken 800 agents off of the ports of entry, that can cause a significant problem.' Kerlikowske also said he was worried about officers trained to work in ports and along borders suddenly taking part in urban operations and coming face to face with crowds. Armed border patrol agents swept through MacArthur Park in Los Angeles last month, prompting children to flee, according to local news reports. The shift in personnel reflects the White House's desire to juice the number of deportations – even if it means sapping manpower normally devoted to countering terrorism and drug trafficking. 'Their experience and training and expertise is on the border,' Kerlikowske said of border patrol agents. 'Not policing and patrolling an urban area.' Nearly 300 people from the border patrol's special operations group were being deployed to support ICE operations, including 'fugitive apprehensions, surveillance, operational planning, entry tactics and task force participation,' according to the document. Most of the CBP personnel were being used in local ICE operations in Miami, New Orleans, Boston, Nashville, San Antonio, Houston, Seattle and other cities around the country. Nearly 200 were enlisted in what the document refers to as 'Operation Los Angeles,' the series of immigration raids that set off mass protests in California last month. The reporter of this story can be reached on Signal at davejamieson.99 or via email at Another 600 had been lent out for 'Operation At Large,' the nationwide ICE plan to round up undocumented immigrants. The agency was also providing 32 aircraft and 118 pilots and agents from its air-and-marine unit, which is responsible for interdicting drugs, weapons and other illicit cargo along the borders. Those personnel have been helping to move detainees from one facility to another as they await deportation. The unit only has around 1,800 agents and support staff. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. The Trump administration hopes to hire 10,000 more ICE agents over the next five years, but it could continue to siphon staff from the ports and borders due to the time it takes to hire. The Republican-controlled Congress recently pumped billions of dollars of new funding into immigration enforcement, including it as part of their tax reform package known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The legislation steers $45 billion toward immigration detention facilities and another $30 billion toward ICE enforcement. But historically, it has taken about half a year to hire an officer to work on deportations. Even if the administration can cut that time down significantly, it still takes months to get new officers trained and onboarded. In the meantime, Trump aides are eager to show the president they are doing whatever they can to further his deportation campaign. The CBP document boasts of the way the agency has diverted agents and officers away from their normal jobs so they can help with raids and detentions. The ports of entry – that's where the fentanyl comes in. If you've taken 800 agents off of the ports of entry, that can cause a significant Kerlikowske, former commissioner of CBP The U.S. Border Patrol 'has expended great resources and manpower to assist ICE to accomplish the presidential mandates that have been set,' the document states. It notes that the loaner program has involved 25 field offices and come at a cost of $20 million as of late June. Although immigration raids are most commonly associated with ICE, customs and border personnel have become a common sight at roundups in California and elsewhere. Masked border patrol agents were just seen making arrests in a Home Depot parking lot in Sacramento on Thursday, according to local news reports. The administration has tried to hype the criminal backgrounds of those it's arresting and deporting, but most appear to only have infractions for traffic or immigration offenses on their records. The clampdown on undocumented workers is growing increasingly unpopular among voters, according to surveys. In a recent CNN poll, 55% of respondents said Trump had gone too far with his deportation campaign, 10 points higher than in February. Kerlikowske predicted that the negative polling and any economic hit due to deportations could prompt the administration to pull back on its raids and shift resources back toward the ports and borders. 'You can probably guess that if they get some numbers they deem sufficient by the end of the year, this is all going to fade off,' he said.
