Morning Security Brief: Border Security, Mayor Threatened, FPS Director Transferred, World Cup Terror Plot Fizzles Out, & More

♦ The White House will send 1,200 National Guardsmen to four Southwest border states for a year to help secure the border and disrupt drug smuggling activities, although there's no word yet when the troops will arrive. "The issue has pushed Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, into something of a corner," The New York Times reports. "As governor of Arizona, she demanded that Guard troops be put on the border. But since joining the Obama administration, she has remained noncommittal about the idea, saying as recently as a month ago that other efforts by Mr. Obama had made the border 'as secure now as it has ever been.'"

♦ In related news, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon is under 24/7 security protection after receiving several specific death threats after criticizing Arizona's new immigration law. Gordon defends his stance from a law enforcement perspective. "Let's realize that what we all do want is border security and immigration reform so that we have legal migration and we don't reward the smugglers and the violent criminals," he said. "We take our police officers and go after the violent criminals to protect all of us, not to be doing a federal government job and creating less safety in our city."

♦ The head of the agency responsible for protecting federal buildings will leave his post in June and transfer internally to a liaison role at the Department of Homeland Security. "Federal Protective Service Director Gary W. Schenkel told colleagues in an e-mail Tuesday that he will move to Homeland Security headquarters in June to serve as acting deputy assistant secretary for state and local law enforcement," reports The Washington Post. Schenkel's had a rocky tenure at the FPS after the Government Accountability Office identified multiple vulnerabilities at federal buildings managed by his agency, including the ability of investigators to smuggle bomb-making materials into them and walk around unmolested.

♦ The alleged al Qaeda plot to attack the upcoming World Cup was nothing more than "a bluff" by the individual arrested, reports South Africa's Sport24.co.za. "I got yesterday the [Interpol] report saying it was just a bluff and there was nothing concrete behind this threat," said FIFA general secretary Jerome Valcke. Even al Qaeda has denied involvement in the plot allegedly hatched by the Saudi man, Abdullah Azam Saleh al-Qahtani, who was arrested in Iraq in early May. "We deny this news altogether," an al Qaeda statement delivered to Islamist Web sites said yesterday.

♦ The Department of Homeland Security is looking to expand border security teams to the Port of Virginia to fight transnational crime, like smuggling. "Creating a Border Enforcement Security Team here would combine resources from ICE, Customs, the Coast Guard, port police and local," The Virginia-Pilot reports. The Port of Virginia is the third largest port on the East Coast.