The ABC News report I have attached below was forwarded to me by one of many people I have met either in person or through the internet.
It appeared on the ABC News website 3 days ago and should be of tremendous concern to our citizens and our nation’s “leaders.”
There are three ways in which a person may fail to do his (her) job.
There is nonfeasance which means not doing the job at all; there is misfeasance which means doing the job ineptly and then there is malfeasance which implies that the person who is failing to do his job is doing so in a way that is criminal in nature. The alarming ABC News report makes it clear that all three categories are involved in a critically important component of national security.
I am however, concerned that there are only a relative few “bad apples” who are giving many thousands of brave and hard working employees of CBP a bad name. It is also important to understand that in one example furnished in the article below, the apparently corrupt law enforcement officer was not a federal officer but was a local law enforcement official.
For the sake of clarity I think it is important to know that where the border is concerned, there are two types of officials. There are the inspectors who decide on whether or not to admit an alien seeking admission into the United States. These inspectors also search people and conveyances for contraband. (I began my career as an Immigration Inspector at John F. Kennedy International Airport.)
The second group of employees of CBP are the members of the United States Border Patrol. Their job is to seek to identify and arrest aliens who circumvent the inspections process as ports of entry.
What is particularly disturbing about the lack of integrity to our nation’s borders is that the current administration and the previous administration refused to accept the premise that an unsecured border might enable the entry of terrorists into our country. Consider if you will, how many times President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the key members of that administration spoke about the “War on Terror.”
To this very day, Dick Cheney touts efforts by the administration of George W. Bush to protect our nation from terrorists.
Meanwhile the Bush administration refused to secure our nation’s borders and the fence is still a work in progress, more than 8 years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Let me make it clear that the construction of a fence would not represent an all encompassing solution to securing our nation’s borders against the unlawful entry of millions of illegal aliens and criminals and, no doubt, terrorists among them. Interestingly our military officials requested that Border Patrol agents be sent to Iraq to help secure the Iraqi border against the entry of terrorists and insurgents!
A secure fence would simply represent one component of many that are desperately needed to help to protect our nation against the illegal entry of aliens.
The current administration is also not really willing to focus the necessary resources to secure our nation’s borders against unlawful entry of illegal aliens and take the other necessary steps to create an immigration system that has meaningful integrity. In fact, the administration and members of Congress are, even as we speak, concocting plans to enact a sweeping amnesty program under the aegis of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” that would require United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the overburdened and inept agency responsible for adjudicating the applications filed by aliens for a variety of immigration benefits including the securing of resident alien status and United States citizenship to administer this national security nightmare.
What is truly insane is that members of both houses of Congress who should be aware of this disastrous situation are apparently not aware of just how disastrous the situation is on our nation’s borders. In fact, no less a “leader” in the United States Senate, Charles Schumer, recently declared that the borders were adequately secured to justify the implementation of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.”
Senator Schumer should know better for a bunch of reasons but let us consider some of them.
He is the chairman of the Senate Immigration Subcommittee! Don’t you think that as the chairman of the senate subcommittee that has oversight responsibility over the various components of the immigration system that he would know the abysmal and highly dangerous situation to be found at our nation’s borders?
What is also noteworthy is that Senator Schumer is one of two senators that are supposed to represent the State of New York, the state that was most heavily impacted by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001!
Should Schumer not be expected to realize that Comprehensive Immigration Reform would be administered by USCIS an agency that has been the focus of a large number of GAO and OIG reports that point to huge failings of that agency to deal with its current workload including the claimed “loss” of 111,000 immigration files relating to aliens who filed applications for a variety of benefits including 30,000 aliens who had filed to acquire United States citizenship through the naturalization process? (As I have noted in many previous commentaries, USCIS then went ahead and adjudicated those 111,000 applications including those for naturalization without providing the adjudicators with the relevant files! This leads me to believe that the files were never lost but were never requested. Requesting and reviewing files requires the expenditure of time and when an agency is determined to eliminate backlogs it is far easier- and quicker- to simply approve the applications to keep the bureaucratic conveyor belt moving!)
In case you think that I am misquoting Senator Schumer, here is a link to a CBS News report dated May 20, 2009 in which he made that astounding assertion about the security of our nation’s borders:
Schumer: Borders Are Now Safe Enough For Immigration Reform
(AP/Matt York)
