Lately, with the current administration, I’m not sure anyone in ICE is really doing jack squat, much less investigating counterfeiting. Aside from shooting one another, that is.
Since 2003, when Homeland Security was born, and 22 agencies, including US Customs and INS were forced into the same agency, ICE, there’s been a civil war between the agents from those two former agencies. It’s become a turf battle, based on a certain arrogance for one’s own former work and contempt for the other’s. Customs agents saw immigration investigations as beneath them, because they thought their own investigations were complex, highly sophisticated, and purely criminal in nature. (Of course they conveniently forgot about the San Francisco AK-47 importation where they invited the media into the investigation and had the case thrown out as a result.) They tried to refuse to perform any work related to the investigation, location and arrest of illegal aliens. One (former Customs) agent even wrote a letter to the ICE boss saying he was ashamed and embarrassed to have the immigration reference in ICE. That contempt still shows itself in how the management, comprising majority former Customs agents, treats the former INS agents in the ICE midst.
Some think the disciplinary measures against the shooter, and the resultant shooting of the (former Customs) supervisor, were related to this internecine warfare. In a recent survey, ICE was ranked as one of the worst managed agencies in the Fed.
I’ve become convinced that the only thing to do is figuratively burn the entire Federal government to the ground, move it to the middle of Kansas, and start over again from scratch allowing nothing that’s not specifically enumerated in Article 1, Section 8.