Customs Service U S

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer has been sentenced to five years in prison for his role in a smuggling ring that brought in hundreds of illegal immigrants through his vehicle lane at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry. Michael Gilliland, 44, admitted in a plea agreement last year receiving as much as $120,000 from two smuggling groups for bypassing inspections on cars loaded with immigrants.

San Diego homicide detectives are investigating the death of a 30-year-old man while in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers Wednesday morning. The man, a suspected smuggler, struggled with officers and died after being restrained, according to homicide Lt. Kevin Rooney. The incident occurred at the San Ysidro port of entry.

A U.S. Customs computer outage that stranded more than 17,000 passengers at LAX was blamed Sunday on faulty hardware and an insufficient backup system that left frustrated travelers sitting on planes or standing in long lines. Saturday night's delays in screening people arriving on international flights were unprecedented, said Kevin Weeks, director of Los Angeles field operations for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency. The computer malfunction, which began at 2 p.m.

Aviation officials criticized U.S. Customs on Monday for being unprepared and taking too long to fix the weekend computer failure at LAX that left more than 17,000 international passengers stranded for hours in airplanes. Accustomed to frequent, short-lived outages, customs officials said they mistakenly believed their computers would be up and running within an hour Saturday. Then they made another mistake, aviation officials said.

U.S. Customs officials said Tuesday that they had traced the source of last weekend's system outage that left 17,000 international passengers stranded in airplanes to a malfunctioning network interface card on a single desktop computer in the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX. The card, which allows computers to connect to a local area network, experienced a partial failure that started about 12:50 p.m.

The Bush administration is planning to call in customs officers to help overwhelmed health inspectors protect Americans from tainted imports of food, toys and other consumer goods, senior officials said Friday, describing a new strategy for dealing with compromised products. The evolving plan, to be delivered to President Bush next month by a task force he appointed, also is expected to call for wider deployment of sophisticated technology at entry points.

U.S. customs agents and local police have identified 520 deportable inmates in the first year of a controversial program to find undocumented immigrants in the city's jail. The inmates included foreign nationals with prior convictions on drug and firearms charges, the Costa Mesa Police Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Thursday. -- David Haldane

The U.S. government apparently is stepping up seizures of cheap drugs ordered by Americans -- mainly seniors -- from abroad, Canadian pharmacies say. The pharmacies, which sell drugs by mail and over the Internet, say their shipments are being intercepted by U.S. Customs officials around the country where foreign mail is handled. "It's huge -- we've had over 800 seizures in January," up from 15 in a typical month, said Barney Britton, president of Calgary-based MinitDrugs.

A congressman from each side of the aisle demanded an explanation Wednesday for increased government seizures of cheap drugs mailed to U.S. customers by Canadian pharmacies. "We believe this unannounced policy of increased enforcement is irresponsible," said Rep. Gil Gutknecht (R-Minn.) in a letter to the Food and Drug Administration and to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

About 13,000 packages of prescription drugs -- most ordered by U.S. seniors from licensed Canadian pharmacies -- have been held up by U.S. Customs and Border Protection since November, according to figures released Wednesday by a Florida senator. The largest number of packages, more than 4,000, have been stopped at the international mail center near Los Angeles International Airport, according to statistics that the office of Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.