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US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials seized 1 million pounds of pork products at the Newark, New Jersey maritime point of entry Friday. The meat is believed to have been smuggled from China, where there is currently an outbreak of the African swine fever (ASF). During a Friday news conference, officials announced the seizure of over 50 shipping containers containing pork products. "Agriculture specialists made a critical interception of these prohibited animal products, and stopped them from entering the US before they could potentially cause grave damage," Troy Miller, director of CBP field operations for the cities of New...

Washington (AFP) - US authorities created a secret database of journalists and activists linked to a caravan of Central Americans who tried to enter the US last year from Mexico, NBC reported. In some cases authorities flagged their passports for alerts, said the San Diego, California affiliate of NBC. It cited documents leaked to it by a source in the Department of Homeland Security who requested not to be named. It said these documents list people who officials thought should be screened at the US-Mexico border. They included 10 journalists, seven of them US citizens, an American lawyer and 47...

WASHINGTON - Jewish-American Robert Levinson was not included in a prisoner exchange with Iran that came as the UN nuclear watchdog confirmed Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal and the West rolled back sanctions. Iran on Saturday released five Americans it was holding in its prisons or in detention, four of them as part of a prison swap which included the release of Jason Rezaian, a Washington Post journalist detained on espionage charges since 2014. The exchange comes on "implementation day" of the sanctions relief for nuclear restrictions deal Iran concluded last year with the United States and five other...

The Trump administration has drafted plans to strip key authorities from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, senior administration officials said on Friday, an acknowledgment that the agency has all but abandoned its legacy of fighting liquor and tobacco smugglers. The A.T.F. traces its roots to Eliot Ness and the Prohibition-era federal agents made famous in the movie “The Untouchables.” But the modern A.T.F. has focused its stagnant budget on violent crime and bombings, while tobacco smuggling — a little-known crime that costs the government billions in lost taxes each year — goes largely unenforced.

The secret account is at the center of a federal racketeering lawsuit brought on by a collective of tobacco farmers who say they were cheated out of $24 million.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Iran said Wednesday it will look into the disappearance of an American man in Iran, a State Department spokesman said. The missing man has been identified as a former FBI agent. Iran replied to a U.S. request for information or help, and asked for additional details about the missing man's travel itinerary, State Department spokesman Tom Casey said. The response came through Swiss intermediaries in Iran. ``We'll see if they come up with anything, but they certainly didn't have any specific information,'' about the man, Casey said. The United States and Iran have no diplomatic relations, but...

A man who told police he was paid to sneak people across the border into the United States has been charged in Utah with human smuggling. Rolando Gomez-Gomez, 33, was charged in Summit County's 3rd District Court on Tuesday with the third-degree felony. In addition, he was charged with giving false information to a police officer, a class C misdemeanor, and speeding, an infraction. On Saturday, Gomez-Gomez was pulled over on I-80 for speeding, according to charging documents.

Border Patrol agents tracked an ultralight aircraft as it crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and made it 30 miles into the country early Tuesday morning — and when they got to the landing spot, they found two Chinese men who had been smuggled in by the aircraft. The ultralight had escaped, lifting back off and returning to Mexico, but agents say they did manage to nab a Mexican man waiting in a vehicle near the landing zone in southern California, apparently ready to pick up the Chinese men and deliver them to their destination. Experts said they had seen ultralights, small...

Jurors in drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s trial Thursday watched footage of the first-ever US Coast Guard interception of a cocaine-packed submarine. Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Todd Bagetis, who took part in the September 2008 seizure, said his crew had been patrolling international waters when they came across the semi-submersible, some 350 miles east of Guatemala. Using night-vision goggles, his team boarded the submarine — where an irate crew immediately tried to sink the boat and toss off the lawmen. “They put the vessel in [reverse] and tried to throw my crew off. My crew were hanging onto the...

Judicial Watch has obtained exclusive information and photos from Guatemalan authorities revealing that they have recovered seven unaccompanied minors from human smugglers working inside the caravan. The children have been taken into custody and they are being provided with food, water and medical attention, according to a high-level Guatemalan government official. The smugglers have been arrested and the broader investigation into criminal activity in the caravan is ongoing...

Homeland Security Spokesperson Katie Waldman said Mexican cartels yield $2.5 billion per year by smuggling people into America at a rate of about $5,000 per person. She offered her remarks on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday in an interview with Breitbart News Deputy Political Editor Amanda House. Waldman’s comments were made in the context of a discussion related to a growing caravan of migrants — originating in Central America — demanding entry to America. Waldman said, “We have an entire southwest border that is controlled by Mexican cartels. You can’t gain access to the U.S. illegally without paying a smuggler $5,000...

A Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient was arrested in California near the Mexico border Tuesday morning and accused of smuggling over $34,000 worth of meth into the U.S., officials said. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said the 22-year-old man, who is originally from Mexico, approached the El Centro Sector checkpoint on Highway 86 at approximately 11:20 a.m. in a grey Kia Optima. Agents called for a secondary inspection of his vehicle, during which a canine team alerted to something suspicious in the trunk, investigators said. Agents recovered 14 vacuum-sealed packages, weighing over 17 pounds in all, that...

In the fourth season of Showtime’s Weeds, drug smugglers use a tunnel connecting border towns in California and Mexico, with the American side of the tunnel opening up under a maternity shop. Yet when a drug-smuggling tunnel was found, last month, connecting a defunct Arizona KFC to a home in Mexico, all the references seemed to be to AMC’s Breaking Bad. I guess what stuck out in most people’s minds was the chicken. KFC is a fast-food chicken joint. And, in Breaking Bad, the show’s fictional crystal meth operation was run under umbrella of Los Pollos Hermanos, a southwest fast-food...

Lunacy: There are increasing calls among leading Democratic candidates for president to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency as part of their effort to pander to the Marxist/anarchist Left-wing faction of the party. But a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies not only highlights the good work that ICE agents do but also the fact that these men and women are vital to our country’s counterterrorism efforts. In particular, the report notes a little-referenced reality: That there are established terrorist smuggling routes into the U.S., and that ICE agents play an important role in interdicting them.

According to new information released, disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok doctored evidence regarding the Anthony Weiner investigation to hide the fact that Weiner’s laptop (which was under investigation for his sex crimes with a minor) contained classified emails belonging to Hillary Clinton. So the big question is did Peter Strzok know Anthony Weiner was involved in something far more sinister? Absolutely he did. It get’s worse, on the same day that a woman was found dead stuffed in a garbage chute in Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin’s apartment building, more information was revealed. What has been found is that on...

Six LGBT activists have found a way to fly the Pride flag in Russia - by wearing football shirts in the rainbow colours. The country has had a law banning the spreading of "gay propaganda" among under-18s since 2013. The Pride flag is a symbol celebrating lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, but displaying it in Russia can get you arrested. The group got together and wore their nations' football tops around Moscow. It meant the shirts of Spain, the Netherlands (who weren't in the World Cup), Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia collectively made the colours of the stripes of...

I have a question for FReepers which might merit some discussion. I've been reading about the amount that people pay coyotes to be smuggled into the US. For Central Americans and other OTM (Other than Mexicans), estimates I've seen vary from $6,000 to $12,000 per person. That amount gets a person smuggled through Mexico (really, the Mexican part is a bribe for passage, possibly un-molested) and across the border into the US. An example article discussing this can be easily found. One example is this one from the NY Times: What it Costs to be Smuggled Across the U. S....

**SNIP** U.S. authorities claim that human smugglers like El Lobo (the wolf) are at the heart of the current border crisis because they have facilitated the travels of the 57,000 unaccompanied immigrant children who've been apprehended in South Texas since October. "We cross them in inner tubes. If they're 3 or 4 years old, I have to cross them myself. I can't let them drown," he says. The Wolf wears Reeboks with pink soles, a black polo shirt and a thin mustache. He's handsome in a bad-boy sort of way. We sit in an open-air lunchroom on a back street...

[Photos] Sections of the Amnok River near Dandong, China, blocked with barbed wire fence [N. Korea] Ha Yoon Ah | 2018-05-11 13:05 Barbed wire fence in the Amnok River area, Dandong. Photo: Daily NK (taken in April 2018). Barbed wire fence in the Amnok River area, Dandong. Photo: Daily NK (taken in April 2018). It has been reported that barbed wire fences have been installed in areas of the Amnok (Yalu) River area near Dandong, Liaoning Province. The fences have sprung up in a sparsely-populated area of the river and are thought to be aimed at deterring smuggling between North...

A Brownsville police officer accused of bringing and harboring undocumented immigrants appeared in federal court in Corpus Christi Tuesday morning, court documents show. Brownsville PD Officer Valerie Rivas, was arrested on Feb. 26 on the Padre Island National Seashore while being swept up in a illegal smuggling attempt that Border Patrol agents foiled over a two-day period. According to a criminal complaint, Rivas’ boyfriend of 12 years is an undocumented immigrant from Tabasco, Mexico, who was set to be smuggled from Brownsville to Victoria. The complaint says when agents arrested the person who was to pick up the immigrants, Rivas,...