After concluding Patriot Acts and our mid-term review session, we will resume the course series of guest speakers and have our mid-term examination. Special Agent Grant Lucas, direct from the Department of Homeland Security headquarters in Washington, D.C., will speak to us about the Department’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement Branch. Created in March 2003, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the largest investigative branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The agency was created after 9/11, by combining the law enforcement arms of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the former U.S. Customs Service, to “more effectively enforce our immigration and customs laws and to protect the United States against terrorist attacks”.

As ominous as its name sounds, “ICE” does this by targeting undocumented or illegal immigrants. As stated by ICE, this agency’s focus is exact: “[T]he people, money and materials that support terrorism and other criminal activities. ICE is a key component of the DHS ‘layered defense’ approach to protecting the nation…and uphold public safety.”
Note the impact and role that this agency has in addressing society’s concerns on illegal immigration and terrorist threats on U.S. soil.

Please review the prepared questions for Special Agent Lucas prepared by our graduate students and submit your own if you like by email to me. I welcome written questions which will be submitted to Special Agent Lucas from everyone!
The graduate students will compose the questions panel and I will serve as moderator.

MIDTERM REVIEW REMINDER

As a final reminder for our mid-term exam, please review carefully the reading material in Daniels which we covered in the mid-term review session. The historical background, the early American groups which attempted to limit immigration and events in our early immigration history reinforce the premise that immigration policy in the United States in not based on some objective standard, but a “creature” of two concepts or disciplines. Review the Avalon film study guide. Know in detail and provide specific persons (and examples) of the ways in which one “Comes to America” (i.e., immigrant and non-immigrant visas; entering illegally) and the real life examples of them seen in this course (family, job, political asylum, or the visa lottery) and the impact they have on U.S. society in the past and today. As discussed during our review, be able to compare Chapter 3 of We are All Suspects Now with the individuals examined during our class discussions and cite those individuals discussed and those seen in Patriot Acts.