While the nation was preoccupied celebrating the holidays and welcoming a new year, two disturbing news articles—reiterating what Judicial Watch has reported for years—shed additional light on the critical situation in the southern border region. The first, an investigative piece by one of the country’s largest newspapers, documents how hundreds of employees and contract workers at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have taken millions of dollars in bribes to let drugs and illegal immigrants into the United States. A few days later the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is cited in a Texas news report confirming that El Paso, long known as America’s “safest city,” is a major corridor for Mexican cartels smuggling drugs into the U.S.

For more than a decade Judicial Watch has exposed the pervasive corruption among DHS agents charged with protecting the U.S-Mexico border. They include Border Patrol officers accepting bribes to help transport illegal immigrants and contraband into the U.S. and DHS employees from various agencies collaborating with Mexican smuggling operations to allow drugs, weapons and possibly terrorists into the country. A few years ago, two veteran Border Patrol agents got convicted for operating a multi-million-dollar human smuggling business in which illegal aliens were transported into the U.S. in government vehicles. In 2013 two officials assigned to crack down on corruption at DHS got indicted for ordering the falsification of records—including active criminal probes—to obstruct an investigation into crooked federal agents suspected of participating in the illegal smuggling of undocumented aliens and/or narcotics into the United States. – READ MORE