ICE Rebrands to Soften Image

Anti-immigrant forces everywhere are going to love this:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will realign its duties to promote criminal investigations over immigrant deportation, officials have announced.

By streamlining and renaming several offices, officials hope to highlight the agency's counterterrorism, money laundering and other complex criminal investigations and in the process "re-brand" ICE, turning the public -- and political -- spotlight away from its immigration work.

It's a serious change, long overdue. I'm not certain that it is possible to "rebrand" the agency to diminish the idea that being undocumented is not a major crime. But it's a move in the right direction.

Detention Centers will return to Federal employees to oversee treatment of inmates

The article from AP reports that the oversight of immigrant detainees will be returned to federal employees. Two years ago, DHS turned this function over to private industry.

The government has been criticized for its treatment of immigration detainees, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has made detention policies a top priority for her department. These changes are seen as a move to improve detainee treatment.