Homeland Security Probes Postings on Newspaper Site

Posted Saturday, July 25, 2009 12:00 am

By: The Department of Homeland Security is investigating whether one of its employees used a government e-mail account to post racially insensitive comments on a newspaper Web site in western New York.

The postings were made in late June in a public comments section in the Wayne County Star.

They were in response to an article about U.S. border patrol agents detaining Mexican farmworkers.

The comments were made anonymously, but the newspaper traced them to Internet protocol addresses in the border patrol division of the Department of Homeland Security.

Department rules bar agents from using work computers to distribute material that insults people based on their national origin.

The posts belittled migrant farmworkers.

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Homeland Security Probes Postings on Newspaper Site

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