ICE reassigns agents to customs

Immigration and Customs Enforcement criminal investigators will no longer be involved in immigration work site enforcement or conduct checks for illegal alien prisoners.

Almost 1,000 ICE Office of Investigations agents will be reassigned exclusively to customs investigations, reducing the manpower involved in detention and removal of illegal aliens to 4,000 nationwide, according to documents obtained by The Washington Times and interviews with ICE union representatives.

ICE officials refused to comment on the internal documents or clarify the number of investigators that are to be reassigned.

The Washington Times has obtained an internal August memorandum written by ICE Office of Investigations Director Marcy Forman and Director John P. Torres, with Detention and Removal Operations (DRO), listing the new protocols for the agency.

Prior to the memorandum, the Office of Investigations worked hand in hand with Detention and Removal agents to remove and deport illegal alien absconders.

"[Detention and Removal] is a rapidly expanding program with the responsibility for ensuring that all removable aliens are detained in a safe environment and expeditiously removed from the United States. DRO has the responsibility for detaining and removing illegal aliens apprehended by ICE, [Customs and Border Protection] and, as resources allow, other law enforcement entities," states the Aug. 20 memo. "It is the vision of ICE for DRO to assume primary responsibility for non-investigative administrative arrests, for example, state and local law enforcement response to interdiction of immigration violators or probation and parole referrals."

A message from Mike Cutler, former INS agent on this article:

The article shows how the administration will stop at nothing to make certain that even while ICE carries out a couple of highly publicized raids, the day to day operations of ICE are being hampered by an extreme lack of resources. Last week it was announced that the Border Patrol would assign a number of its agents to the job of constructing the border fence. Now we are being told that ICE will reassign one thousand enforcement personnel to enforcing the customs laws rather than the immigration laws. I guess the geniuses at ICE think it is more important to investigate and arrest those who are counterfeiting designer handbags then those who counterfeit identity documents! The number of fugitive aliens who are present in the United States has roughly doubled since September, 2001 from the slightly more than 300,000 fugitive aliens also known as alien absconders, to the point we are at now where that number has soared to more than 600,000. With the reassignment of those thousand ICE agents to customs law enforcement efforts I wonder how quickly the number of fugitive or absconder aliens will double again.

Sara Carter quoted me in today’s article as stating that instead of providing meaningful enforcement of the immigration laws, the administration has done everything possible to create an illusion of enforcement while making certain that no matter what, the immigration laws would only be enforced sporadically at best to create an illusion of enforcement. Blue smoke does not make an effective barrier and yet that is precisely what the administration is doing, generating lots of smoke in the much publicized circus-stunt raids thereby and trying to convince the American citizens that the job is being done! Meanwhile the flood of illegal aliens into our country continues.

Fortunately for “We the People,” and unfortunately for the President and the other open borders advocates, the American people are not as dumb as the President would apparently hope that they are! When the Senate attempted to pass the “Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill that I came to refer to as the “Terrorist Assistance and Facilitation Act of 2007” so many Americans called their respective senators’ offices that the Senate switchboard shut down! “We the People” made all the difference! We flexed our collective muscles and the Senate backed down! However, the battle may have been won but the war is far from over. It would appear that now the next move by the open borders advocates in the Senate will attempt to pass separate bills to achieve most of the objectives of the bill that was just defeated. This is why we must remain vigilant and must continue to work together to prevent the legislative thugs on the “Hill” from using this new strategy to ram this legislative detritus down our throats.

The President claims that the number of arrests are down along the Mexican border because the border is under control. If you believe that story, as they say in New York, “I have a bridge to sell you!” First of all it would appear that arrests are down because the outrageous arrest and prosecution of Border Patrol Agents Ramos and Compean along with a number of their colleagues as most definitely had a chilling effect on their colleagues. Second of all, while it is impossible to know how many illegal aliens there are because millions of them entered our country without being inspected therefore there is no way of knowing how many of these trespassers are now present in the United States. Additionally, there is no way of knowing how many aliens who were lawfully admitted into the United States as nonimmigrant visitors have failed to depart the United States because even after the expenditure of more than one billion dollars, US VISIT, the program that was created to track the entry and departure of temporary visitors into the United States, the system is still unable to track the departure of most of these alien tourists and other temporary entrants.

Therefore we while we cannot directly count how many illegal aliens are present in the United States we can gauge the growth of the illegal alien population in the United States by looking at the remittances (money wired from the United States to foreign countries). Three years ago approximately 30 billion dollars was wired from the United States to Latin America and the Caribbean. Last year that number increased by 50% to 45 billion dollars. According to studies done by the World Bank, most remittances are sent by illegal aliens who are working in the United States.

Meanwhile, the administration keeps on hammering the point that we are waging a war on terrorists who want to come to the United States and slaughter as many Americans as they can! Please go back and read that last sentence again: “terrorists want to come to the United States to slaughter as many Americans as they can!” The President has repeatedly say that we are fighting them (the terrorists) over there so that we will not have to fight them over here. Let us put these two thought together and see where this leads us: In order to protect our nation against the next terrorist attack we need to keep them from coming to the United States to prevent them from launching another devastating terrorist attack. Meanwhile our borders represent little more than speed bumps! There have been numerous reports about aliens from “Special Interest Countries” that is to say countries associated with terrorism, who have been encountered attempting to enter our country. It is estimated that the Border Patrol only stops one third of the illegal aliens who attempt to enter our country. This is probably a wildly optimistic assessment. This then begs the question, how many aliens from Special Interest Countries have succeeded in gaining entry into our country?

Let us also consider that it is estimated that some 40% of the illegal alien population did not run our nation’s borders but rather were admitted via the inspections process and then went on to violate the terms of their admission by overstaying the amount of time for which they were admitted, accepting unauthorized employment, committing a crime and getting convicted for committing that crime or otherwise violating our laws. The 19 terrorists who attacked our nation on September 11, 2001, in fact, all entered the United States via the inspections process. The task of policing those aliens who violate the terms of their admission is one of many of the responsibilities of the special agent of ICE.

Meanwhile, as bleak as all of this might seem, there is an issue not noted in the article below, the fact that the immigration benefits program is utterly mired in incompetence, inefficiency and corruption of one sort or another. Without an adequate number of ICE special agents to create an immigration bureaucracy that possesses even a modicum of integrity, criminals and terrorists are able to easily game the system and secure resident alien status and even United States citizenship. As I have pointed out on so many previous occasions, USCIS, the division of DHS that adjudicates applications for a wide variety of immigration benefits including resident alien status and United States citizenship, claims to have lost 111,000 immigration alien files relating to aliens seeking various immigration benefits including 30,000 aliens who filed applications for United States citizenship. USCIS then went ahead and adjudicated those applications without the relating files!

This administration has and absolutely abysmal track record where the enforcement of the immigration laws is concerned.

On March 10, 2005 I testified before the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims on the issue of: “Interior Immigration Enforcement Resources.” The hearing, in part was conducted because while Congress had appropriated sufficient funds to hire an additional 800 new special agents for ICE, the administration and the President had cut that number to just 143. Similarly the Congress had authorized adequate funds to hire an additional 2,000 Border Patrol agents for the Border Patrol yet the President cut that number to just 210. Clearly the administration has been absolutely unwilling to secure our nation’s borders and/or create an immigration system that possesses integrity.. You can read the transcript of that hearing at:

http://judiciary.house.gov/media/pdfs/printers/109th/99785.pdf

In the name of the “War on Terror” our expectations of privacy have been greatly eroded, the government is becoming ever more intrusive and the freedoms we have considered our birthright have been diminished. Let me make this clear. I favor many of the steps being taken to secure our nation but I am absolutely opposed to these actions being taken if our borders are not being made secure (even while Border Patrol agents are being sent to Iraq to secure the Iraqi border). I am opposed to these measures if our government is able to expand the Visa Waiver Program that enables aliens from some 27 countries, apparently soon to be expanded to perhaps as many as 39 countries, to enter our country without first applying for and receiving visas. I would remind you that aliens do not have an inherent right to enter our country. This is no different from the fact that strangers have no inherent right to enter our homes.

When illegal aliens enter our country many simply want to work illegally while a significant number of criminal aliens also seek to enter our country to ply their respective “trades” and victimize people in our country.

Increasingly cities across our country are facing a marked increase in gang violence. Dead is dead. To the victim of a vicious criminal or his (her) family, there is no difference between being killed by terrorists or by criminals. Yet our nation’s “leaders” in bowing to the demands of special interest groups and especially greedy campaign contributors, have ignored the demands of their constituents and have ignored the most commonsense approach to protecting our nation and our citizens. They have ignored and violated their oaths of office.

Either our nation is to be serious about prosecuting the “War on Terror” or all they are doing is creating a charade that, in the name of commerce and greed, may well cost many Americans there lives when the next terrorist attack is carried out because our nation failed to secure its borders and create an immigration system that possesses real integrity.

The issue of border security and the creation of an immigration bureaucracy that deters fraud and possesses meaningful integrity are labor intensive propositions. Without and adequate number of Border Patrol agents and an adequate number of special agents at ICE who have the resources and training that they need, our nation cannot be secure and our citizens cannot be made safe in their own communities throughout the United States.

The fact that agents at ICE are being moved to enforcing the customs laws should unfortunately not be a surprise although it is extremely disturbing. Most of the program managers at ICE came from legacy Customs and not from Legacy INS. This too, was apparently not an accident but was done to downplay the enforcement of the immigration laws.

On May 5, 2005, I was called to testify before the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims on the issue:

“NEW ‘’DUAL MISSIONS’’ OF THE IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES” I expressed my extreme concerns about the impact that the merger of legacy Customs with legacy INS would ultimately have on the enforcement of the immigration laws by this ill-conceived marriage of these two very dissimilar agencies. When you read the transcript of the hearing you will readily understand my misgivings and the misgivings of others who testified at that hearing. The announcement of the reassignment of the ICE agents to customs enforcement work, while outrageous was easily predictable.

You can read the transcript of that hearing at:

http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/judiciary/hju21026.000/hju21026_0.HTM

The sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 is only a couple of weeks away yet our borders are porous and the administration is still doing everything in its power to make certain that the immigration laws are not enforced and the immigration system is as dysfunctional as it has ever been!

“We the People” must make a point of calling our members of Congress and the United States Senate and being heard! The illusion of enforcement will not deter illegal immigration and will not protect our nation or our citizens. The thousands of Americans who die each year at the hands of criminal aliens who have no right to be in our country is no illusion. The victim of the attacks of September 11, 2001 was not illusion. If, God forbid, there is another terrorist attack committed in this country, the victims of that attack will not be an illusion either. The only illusions are the supposed enforcement of our immigration laws and the supposed leadership by all too many politicians.

Democracy is not a spectator sport!

Lead, follow or get out of the way!

-michael cutler-

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