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June 7, 2002How the INS invited robbery

Diana West

Where were you last weekend between the hours of 1 p.m. Saturday and 6 p.m. Sunday? That's when police in Tacoma, Washington, believe somebody broke into the local inspection office of the Immigration and Naturalization Services and made off with a choice collection of INS ink stamps, all of which, with a well-aimed thud, can officially and talismanically grant access to the United States.
      Vanished are: a 90-day-admission stamp that validates foreign passports; a "parolee" stamp for refugees; two different stamps that allow foreign sailors ashore to shop; and an "I-551" stamp that marks the visas of those awaiting permanent-residency cards. Also pinched in the weekend burglary were a slew of INS forms, an INS badge, a .40-caliber Beretta handgun, two clips of ammunition and a laptop computer.
      A nerve-wracking haul, in these times, to say the least ? unless, of course, you happen to work for the INS. With a determinedly chipper clairvoyance, these real-life Keystone Kops ? sans laughs ? have decided the burglary has absolutely no connection to terrorism. "We're concerned that someone broke in," INS spokesman Garrison Courtney told the Seattle Times. "But we're not overly concerned they took the stamps or the badge. That's OK to us. I know the public is concerned that they could be used to make fraudulent stamps, but we're prepared for that."
      That's OK and we're prepared? Pardon me for withholding audible sighs of relief, but this is the INS ? butt of Islamist terrorists and late-night comics everywhere ? not the Boy Scouts. Frankly, the agency should be a little "overly concerned." But no. "We've got them flagged," Mr. Courtney continued, just brimming with comic-book bravado as he argued the worthlessness of the booty. "We'll know right away that they're stolen."
      Each stamp, it seems, has its own number, and, in the event of loss or theft, INS agents are notified a number has become invalid. So now, in addition to keeping an eye on the big picture ? you know, identifying terrorists passing into the country ? already over-stretched immigration agents have to check the fine print, literally, on their papers.
      But even if the INS isn't fooled, others easily could be. "These stamps, when placed on a passport, any passport, or any other INS documents, are get-home-free cards when stopped by local police," Ben Ferro, a retired INS district director with a tighter grip on reality, explained to Tacoma's News Tribune. "These are stamps that authenticate someone's documents. In light of September 11, the agency should be turning things upside down looking for these stamps." But it doesn't seem to want to break a sweat. "If they're going to send in this stuff, we're going to catch it," Mr. Courtney told the newspaper. "We're everywhere."
      Tell that to the New York City cops who, as the New York Post reported last week, had to free an overloaded vanful of Middle Eastern men holding "a variety of paperwork" (including a fake government card from Times Square and a phony passport) because the INS didn't seem to have a soul on duty over Memorial Day weekend. The agency contact number rang an INS office in Vermont, more than 300 miles away. As one angry policeman put it, "What's the point of stopping vans and risking your life when the one agency with power blows you off? And this is after September 11." And what did the INS have to say in response? "Since September 11, our primary focus has been on terrorist-related investigations, and, contrary to belief, we are not in the business of detaining people without cause. These men posed no terrorist threat or, for that matter, any threat to the community."
      Sweeping, aren't they? Snippy, too. You might wonder how the INS knew there was no terrorist threat if its agents never showed up. Probably the same way it figured the theft of the visa stamps was no big deal. (And what ever happened to policing good, old-fashioned immigration violations, anyway?) Such high-handed bumbling may be outrageous, but it is also commonplace. Agency overhaul, anyone? Thank goodness the Justice Department has decided to pitch in, having called on anti-terrorism teams of federal, state and local officers formed since September 11 to assist the INS in registering and fingerprinting Muslim and Middle Eastern visa holders. Professional Arabists and civil libertarians are squawking, but as Rep. Mark Foley, Florida Republican has noted, "Al Qaeda is not an equal-opportunity employer."
      By reactivating a law unofficially abandoned due to sheer visa volume and INS budget cuts in the 1980s, and applying it to visitors from countries that "pose the highest risk to our security," the government is finally taking a serious step to head off the terror networks that threaten us. In so doing, it will help the INS help itself ? and the nation it serves.

Diana West is an editorial writer and columnist for The Washington Times.

...police in Tacoma, Washington, believe somebody broke into the local inspection office of the Immigration and Naturalization Services and made off with a choice collection of INS ink stamps, all of which, with a well-aimed thud, can officially and talismanically grant access to the United States.

Vanished are: a 90-day-admission stamp that validates foreign passports; a "parolee" stamp for refugees; two different stamps that allow foreign sailors ashore to shop; and an "I-551" stamp that marks the visas of those awaiting permanent-residency cards. Also pinched in the weekend burglary were a slew of INS forms, an INS badge, a .40-caliber Beretta handgun, two clips of ammunition and a laptop computer.

Ahhh... Tacoma.

Airport workers arrested by INS over fake papers

4/20/02

SEATAC - Immigration officials apprehended a dozen illegal workers Thursday morning after discovering they had used fraudulent documents to land jobs at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

Now detained at the Immigration and Naturalization Service's detention center, the employees worked as food handlers, office staff and construction laborers. Most had access to sensitive areas, including the airport tarmac, said Seattle District INS spokesman Garrison Courtney.

Including Thursday's arrests, 37 Sea-Tac airport workers have been arrested for immigration violations since January, Courtney said. Though he wouldn't specify countries of origin for those arrested this week, Courtney said none were "from countries we'd deem terrorist countries or those with al-Qaida ties."

The INS review of 5,000 Sea-Tac airport employees is one in a series of investigations across the country launched after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Al Gore: A "Reinventor" Par Excellence

Sept. 27, 2000

The claim that Al Gore invented the internet has been a favorite target of political jokes, but Al Gore's role in "reinventing" the INS is no laughing matter. He was a driving force behind the perversion of Immigration and Naturalization Service procedures in order to "invent" a million votes for Clinton-Gore in November 1996.
Al Gore was the Administration's point man in charge of the plan developed in early 1996 to put a million aliens on the fast track to citizenship even if they didn't qualify and even if they had criminal records. Gore was responsible for keeping the pressure on INS to make sure the aliens were naturalized by September 1, the last day to register for the presidential election.

INS Administrator Doris Meissner was at first reluctant to go along with these shenanigans. But she finally acquiesced in Gore's plan to remove alleged "bureaucratic roadblocks" to speedy naturalization.

The "smoking gun" documentation came to light sort of as an aside in the new book "Sellout" by David P. Schippers, his own story as chief investigative counsel for the House impeachment of Bill Clinton. Before Schippers was ordered to limit his investigations to the Monica case, he had focused on the politicization of the INS.

Schippers uncovered a memo written early in 1996 from Doug Farbrother of the National Performance Review (NPR) to Bill Clinton reminding the President that he had "asked us to expedite the naturalization of nearly a million legal aliens." Farbrother set forth the plan "to force some serious `reinvention' on INS" by "appointing one of our proven NPR reinventors as Deputy INS Commissioner" and moving the existing Deputy elsewhere.

The National Performance Review is now called Vice President Al Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government, according to its website www.npr.gov. This confirms Gore's peculiar obsession with reinventing things.

Dr. Elaine Kamarck in Gore's office responded to Farbrother on March 21, 1996 in a solid-cap memo: "THE PRESIDENT IS SICK OF THIS AND WANTS ACTION. IF NOTHING MOVES TODAY WE'LL HAVE TO TAKE SOME PRETTY DRASTIC MEASURES."

A March 22 memo to Al Gore from Doug Farbrother then reported that he told INS "to waive stupid rules, move money from one account to another as needed, and recruit and hire people locally instead of through the slow centralized process." Farbrother added that each city manager in the major cities was to be given "a project budget to spend as needed."

Farbrother's memo spelled out other details of the plan to circumvent customary procedure: "delegate hiring authority, waive extensive background investigations on new employees, allow the cities `overhire authority.'" This carried out the suggestion originally made in a February 15 memo from HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros to Clinton and Gore suggesting the use of "volunteers" from Hispanic action groups to "process" naturalization applications.

In a subsequent fax, Farbrother wrote that he had instructed INS Commissioner Doris Meissner to "get the results the Vice President wants."

In a memo addressed to Al Gore on March 28, Farbrother restated the goal to "produce a million new citizens before election day." The game plan was to "blast INS headquarters loose from their grip on the frontline managers" and to "make Doris Meissner delegate broad authority to her field managers" in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Miami.

A March 29 memo from Farbrother to Elaine Kamarck revealed his concern lest this plan be exposed as "a citizenship/Clinton voter mill."

This ingenious 1996 "voter mill" paid off big time. An audit by the accounting firm of KPMG Peat Marwick uncovered some of the results.

The newly naturalized citizens who were qualified to vote by this Gore project included more than 75,000 who had arrest records when they applied, an additional 115,000 citizens whose fingerprints were unclassifiable for various technical reasons and were never rechecked, and another 61,000 people who were given citizenship without submitting any fingerprints at all.

Federal law requires that an alien's application for citizenship must be accompanied by a complete set of fingerprints, which must be cleared by the FBI to determine if the applicant has a criminal record.

Schippers sent the FBI a list of 100 of these new citizens who had committed documented heinous crimes prior to naturalization and discovered that 20 percent were arrested for serious crimes after citizenship was granted in 1996. No one knows how many thousands of criminals were granted citizenship whose fingerprints were never checked at all.

Schippers uncovered some of the additional ways that alien applications were processed. INS agents were directed to relax the testing for English, to complete every interview within 20 minutes, and to ensure that all applicants passed the Civics test by continuing to ask questions until they got a sufficient number right, sometimes asking 25 questions to get four or five correct answers.

Crooked politicians have always stuffed the ballot box in traditional ways, but Al Gore must be given credit for one of the most ingenious. Is the same plan in the works for this year's election?

Interesting! See #2 also.

Thanks for these articles. When, oh, when are Bush, Ridge, and Ashcroft going to do SOMETHING about the INS? It is the most corrupt, arrogant, incompetent, and plain evil department n our government, as we all saw during the tragic Elian episode.