Thread: Customs Agents catch barbequed bats

Customs Agents catch barbequed bats
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Homeland Security' set to go toe-to-toe with 'American Idol'

By Lynn Elber
ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ratings champion "American Idol" will face serious competition when it returns next week: the Department of Homeland Security.

"Homeland Security USA," an ABC reality series debuting tomorrow, tracks the daily efforts of the federal workers responsible for safeguarding the nation's airports, borders, waters and anyplace else threats might arise.

While viewers see the mechanics of agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Transportation Security Administration, absent is discussion of such hot-button issues as post-Sept. 11 security programs or immigration policies. That's by design, said series executive producer Arnold Shapiro, whose credits include "Rescue 911" and "Big Brother."

"It doesn't have a political point of view," Shapiro said. "It's not meant to show the (department) higher-ups... just the average men and women on the front lines protecting our country from various things illegal and dangerous."

"Homeland Security USA" has a week to win viewers before it has to face Fox's hit singing contest, which returns Jan. 13.

The ABC series, filmed with the department's cooperation, is a virtual travelogue in the first episode as it skips from border crossings at Elaine, Wash., and San Ysidro to Los Angeles International Airport to a mail processing plant.

Turns out even mail has dramatic possibilities, as sharp-eyed officers pry open toys containing black-market prescription drugs and uncover an exotic and illicit food item: barbecued bats from Thailand.
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The show mixes the offbeat and the serious, including drug smugglers, people trying to enter the country with doctored papers and a woman who has been shoved under a car seat in a painful, failed effort to slip into the country.

Not all goes the department's way in the 13 episodes. In one scene, guns are drawn against a man trying to drive across the U.S.-Mexico border with his family, terrifying his wife and young children, until agents discover it's a case of mistaken identity.

Shapiro says that he retained control over the show's creative content.

The department pre-screened episodes and could ask for deletion of elements that would have revealed law-enforcement strategies, infringed on personal rights or jeopardized pending legal cases.

The series is based on Australia's popular "Border Security," which was optioned by ABC, "Homeland Security USA" is intended as entertainment without a political point of view, said Vicki Dummer, ABC's executive in charge of alternative series.

The department saw the show "as a great opportunity to help the American public understand what their government does and what the Department of Homeland Security, the youngest department, does," department spokesman Ed Fox said.

But "Homeland Security USA" has provoked debate sight unseen. A Facebook page opposing the series drew more than 500 postings within its first few days. Many were negative, including denunciations of the show as government propaganda

The page was created by Tina Shull, a graduate student in history at the University of California Irvine, whose critical view of Homeland Security was shaped in part by the detention and deportation of her Albanian husband after he was refused political asylum.

"My biggest fear about the show is it's simpli fying a very complex range of duties that DHS takes on.... It's making light of a very serious, very controversial issue in our society today," Shull said. She wants ABC to reconsider airing it.

Shapiro is adamant in his defense of "Homeland Security USA."

"I don't see how actually and factually documenting something that happens before our eyes, and editing it in a factual way — in other words, not manipulatively, can be considered propaganda," he said.
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This was in the print addition of the Jan. 5, 2009 San Diego Union Tribune, page C-7, but I can't find it online anywhere.
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Feel free to post this in our news section if you like. Make a comment that you spoke to me and i said it was OK to post without a link.

I hope this show does a good job. We could use the boost.

W
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Vox populi vox Dei
Ad majorem Dei gloriam

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thank you for bringing this to us JohnDoe2. Excellent work!

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I normally don't watch the network channels, but made an exception for this show.

I was expecting the standard liberal view of border enforcement to prevail, but it appears that the producer / director didn't allow politics to creep in too much. The show really demonstrates the challenges faced with border enforcement and how prevalent human / drug smuggling is and how hard they have to work to stop it.

Homeland Security: USA
By Jon Feere, January 7, 2009

Tattooed gang members, drug smugglers, human traffickers, and people emitting radiation from their bodies. These are just a few of the types to cross paths with DHS officials in ABC’s new reality series, “Homeland Security: USA.â€