Sources say immigration agents believe the federal government is deliberately not giving them work.
By Ryan Lovelace
President Obama is encouraging Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to slack off on the job, former border cops tell National Review Online.
Some ICE officials think the Obama administration has intentionally neglected to give them orders to support efforts to resolve the crisis on America’s southwestern border, says Ronald Colburn, former national deputy chief of the U.S. Border Patrol. As a result, the wave of unaccompanied children from Central America is unfolding while ICE officials cool their heels.
“They’re sitting still at their desks — reading newspapers, playing video games on their government computers — because they’re not being tasked with work, and they feel like it’s coming all the way down from the top,” Colburn tells NRO. “These are guys that do want to go out more, but basically they’re not.” Colburn says some ICE agents go work out at the gym for four hours each day because they have little work to do. Meanwhile, he says, the Obama administration continues to “strangle” Border Patrol agents who must process and handle the latest flood of Central Americans rather than stand guard at the border.
Border Patrol agents are often referred to as “catchers” because they are tasked with apprehending and processing illegal aliens crossing the border. ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations officers are dubbed “removers” because of their added responsibility of deporting illegal aliens.
Dave Stoddard, executive vice president of the Law Enforcement Officers Advocates Council and a retired Border Patrol agent with several decades of experience on America’s borders, tells National Review Online that ICE agents have voiced their complaints with him about how little work they have to do. “These ICE officers are sitting, in some cases, in brand new offices, brand-new furniture and the telephone that never rings, and brand-new cars with no place to go,” Stoddard says. “They’re on the payroll and they need to entertain themselves or occupy themselves some way or other.” Stoddard says some officers review law books while others choose to hone their skills at the shooting range because of the light workload.
An ICE spokesperson declined to comment to NRO about this story.
Stoddard says every ICE agent, Border Patrol official, investigator, and law-enforcement officer he knows within the Department of Homeland Security feels “terrified” of speaking out and committing a violation of policy. He says his experiences have led him to believe that speaking out against the wishes of DHS officials often carries more immediate consequences from management than if an agent is suspected of committing a criminal act.
Some U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers include helpful reminders about such violations of policy in their written communications. One CBP e-mail obtained by NRO includes the command “Anyone who steals, knowingly converts to his use or the use of another, or without authority, sells, conveys or disposes of any record or thing of value to U.S. Customs and Border Protection shall be fined or imprisoned not more [than] ten (10) years pursuant to 18 USCS § 641.” After speaking out publicly about public-health risks associated with the illegal immigrants transported to the San Diego Sector, Border Patrol agent Ron Zermeno received a letter, obtained by NRO, saying “you must immediately cease and desist” from issuing statements and press releases to the media with information that is “Law Enforcement sensitive.” Now ICE officials, Border Patrol agents, and others in the federal government have begun to confide in their former colleagues.
Colburn says the agents who have approached him are frustrated and note that the bottleneck of Central Americans crossing into the U.S. has been made worse by the federal government. “According to my sources, it appears that this administration is causing that [bottleneck] on purpose,” Colburn says. “So they [the Obama administration] may be saying they’re trying to resolve it, but they’re doing something different. They need to put their actions where their mouths are.”
Nearly all of the illegal immigrant children who have been apprehended along the U.S.-Mexico border in the last two years have been teenagers.
According to a new Pew Research report, in fiscal year 2013, 91% of illegal immigrant "children" apprehended at the border were teenagers. Of the nearly 60,000 illegal immigrant "children" who were apprehended since October of last year, 84% have been teenagers.
Pew obtained the government figures through a Freedom of Information Act request, and the numbers paint "the first publicly available detailed portrait of the age and home country of child migrants —unaccompanied and accompanied – caught at the U.S.-Mexico border from Oct. 1, 2012, to May 31, 2014."
Pew also noted that while the number of children ages 12 and younger who have been apprehended has increased, "the number of apprehensions of children who are accompanied by a parent or guardian has increased at a far faster clip, nearly tripling (160% increase) in less than a year." According to the data, "in the partial fiscal year 2014 data provided, 22,069 accompanied children were apprehended, up from just 8,479 during all of the previous fiscal year."
There have been nearly 60,000 illegal immigrant children who have crossed the border since October of last year, and federal officials estimate at least 150,000 more will enter the country in the next fiscal year. The number of illegal immigrant children entering the nation from Central America drastically spiked after President Barack Obama enacted his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that gave temporary amnesty to certain DREAMers in 2012. The murder rate in Central American nations declined since then.
Texas state Senator Dan Patrick said law enforcement officers have said somewhere between one in five and one in 10 illegal immigrants are actually apprehended, which means there could be nearly 300,000 illegal immigrants who have snuck into the country undetected since October of last year. Patrick also noted that Texas has 100,000 illegal immigrant gang members and there are more illegal immigrants entering the state each week than people who are born in Texas during the same time period.
I have a question for Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats. Will these "children" be safer in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia then they were in their home countries?
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