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The U.S.-Mexico border is currently patrolled by 10 Predator surveillance drones. The immigration reform bill introduced in the Senate would increase that in order to provide constant coverage. ABC/Univision reported

“Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, could soon be patrolling the United States border with Mexico 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That's what the major immigration reform bill introduced last week by a bipartisan group of senators proposes.

“The goal: "effective control" of the border. Under the bill, no immigrant granted provisional legal status would be eligible to apply for a Green Card until the Department of Homeland Security shows it's made substantial progress toward that goal. Border hawks want the pathway to citizenship more firmly tied to border security success.”

But, as Common Dreams reports,

“As the new immigration reform bill moving through the US Senate puts aerial drones at the center of a beefed-up militarized approach to border security, a new report shows that the existing drone-border program has proved an "inefficient, costly and absurd approach" to monitoring the border or enforcing current immigration laws.”

The report was produced by the Center for International Policy, you can read it at Drones over the Homeland.

An Israeli jet shot down a drone off its northern coast on Thursday. While some Israeli officials said they believed it was an Iranian-manufactured aircraft sent by Hezbollah, that group denied it. The Associated Press reported:

Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said the unmanned aircraft was detected as it was flying over Lebanon and tracked as it approached Israeli airspace.

He said the military waited for the aircraft to enter Israeli airspace, confirmed it was “enemy,” and then an F-16 warplane shot it down, smashing its wreckage into the sea about five miles (eight kilometers) off the northern port of Haifa. Lerner said Israeli naval forces were searching for the remains of the aircraft.

He said it still was not clear who sent the drone, noting it flew over Lebanese airspace, but that it could have originated from somewhere else.

The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights is holding a hearing this afternoon on “The Constitutional and Counterterrorism Implications of Targeted Killing.” According to Subcommittee Chair Sen. Richard Durbin’s office:

“the hearing will address the legal and policy issues raised by drone strikes, including the constitutional and statutory authority for targeted killings, the scope of the battlefield in the conflict with Al Qaeda and associated forces, and the international precedent set by U.S. drone policy.”

You can watch it live here.    

Boston residents are waking up this morning to a virtual shutdown of many parts of the city after a contfrontation that left one of the marathon suspects dead, according to reports. An M.I.T. police officer was also killed. From NBC News: 

Law enforcement officials said the tumult began just before 11 p.m., when the suspects approached a police officer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and shot him in the head.

The two then stole the officer’s cruiser, robbed a nearby 7-Eleven, carjacked a Mercedes SUV and briefly kidnapped the driver, the sources said. The suspects threw explosives out the window during the chase that followed, they said. A Boston transit police officer was shot and wounded, authorities said.

The dead suspect — the man in the black hat from the FBI photos — had an improvised explosive device strapped to his chest, law enforcement officials said.

The two suspects have been identified as brothers — the one on the run identified as 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. 

This story is developing. 

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