Homeland Insecurity

At ICE, whose staff is principally comprised of plainclothes investigators who formerly worked either as Customs agents at Treasury or immigration agents at Justice, director Michael Garcia left to become U.S. Attorney in Manhattan. But Senate confirmation of his would-be replacement, Julie Myers, a White House official who also worked as an aide to Chertoff when he headed the Justice Department's criminal division, has stalled with some Democrats expressing concern about her qualifications, her political connections and her possible knowledge of Justice Department deliberations over interrogation techniques used on suspected terrorist detainees.

The agencies, meanwhile, have suffered from assorted internal crises. A financial dispute between ICE and CBP, for instance, led to a hiring and training freeze inside ICE and to a funding crisis that, according to officials who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the topic, led to such severe travel restrictions that investigators could not get authorization to make even short trips away from their offices to interview key witnesses in criminal cases. Morale of ICE agents also suffered when Homeland Security headquarters, during Ridge's tenure as secretary, surrendered to the FBI authority to take the lead on financial investigations related to terrorism--a subject area in which former Customs investigators had traditionally specialized.

ICE spokesman Dean Boyd says Congress recently alleviated the bureau's financial crisis by doling out enough new funding to enable the agency to start hiring and training "hundreds" of new investigators; the agency also now has enough money to pay its agents' travel expenses, Boyd says, though some investigators in the field have claimed that the new funding has yet to reach down to the bureaucratic levels where it is actually needed. (Boyd said that despite the now-eased funding crisis, ICE still managed to launch major campaigns to crack down on hundreds of cases involving child porn and street gangs.)

As part of Chertoff's reorganization plan, ICE recently turned over to its rivals at CBP a fleet of patrol boats and airplanes that the agency had principally used to chase drug smugglers and illegal aliens. Now, however, there are arguments inside CBP over who is responsible for maintaining and staffing the vehicles and who is responsible for sending them out on missions. According to CBP spokesman Michael Friel, the agency recently hired a former Air Force major general, Michael Kostelnik, to be assistant CBP commissioner in charge of air and sea assets. But chiefs of local Border Patrol "sectors" are asserting authority to direct CBP air or sea missions within their operating areas, and Friel says the agency is now trying to work out who will control the vehicles under what circumstances.

Apart from these bureaucratic, financial and political problems, the border-control agencies continue to face traditional problems of corruption and effectively managing the vast amounts of data related to the entry of people and cargo into the country. In a report made public in the last few days, the Homeland Security Department's inspector general recounted how a tipoff from drug-enforcement agents had to the discovery that two Border Patrol agents were running an illegal-alien smuggling operation which charged foreigners up to $2,000 apiece for "guaranteed entry" into the United States. According to the report, the smugglers used the Border Patrol's own vehicles to smuggle the aliens into the country; it later turned out that one of the crooked officers was also an illegal alien who had used fake documents to get into the U.S. Navy and Border Patrol.

The same inspector general report identified "deficiencies" in an ICE program designed to locate and capture foreigners who had violated the conditions of their admission into the United States. One problem was that while Homeland Security is getting much better at handling data logging the entry of people into the country, it lacks reliable data on people leaving. So, according to the report, while ICE last year received more than 300,000 leads on noncitizens who might have overstayed their visas, the agency had to close out more than 138,000 of these cases when it turned out the person had already left the United States. In the end, out of all the remaining leads, ICE only actually caught 671 aliens who had overstayed; the inspector general predicted that of those, "very few" would actually be deported unless they also have a criminal record.