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[Page: E2243] GPO's PDF---
Chairman Tancredo, members of the Congress, ladies and gentlemen, I greatly appreciate this opportunity to share my views and perspectives which I have acquired during my roughly 30 years as an immigration officer. I would like to start out by giving you an overview of my career with the INS, I will summarize it for you briefly.
I entered on duty with the INS at New York City in October, 1971, as an Immigration Inspector at JFKIA. I ultimately spent 4 years in that assignment conducting inspections of passengers arriving at that port and seeking entry into the United States. During the course of that assignment I was detailed for approximately one year to an examinations unit known as the I-130 Unit, so-named because the applications which we were adjudicating were known as I-130 Petitions. These are the petitions that are filed by spouses and other relatives who are seeking to obtain Lawful Permanent Resident Alien status for their respective spouses, children or other immediate relatives. My assignment dealt with the I-130 petitions which were filed by either United States citizens or LPRs on behalf of their alien spouses. My goal in this assignment was to seek to uncover marriage fraud in which the marital relationship exists only for the purpose of providing the alien beneficiary with LPR status.
In 1975 I became a Criminal Investigator or, as it is now known, a Special Agent. I have remained a Special Agent with the INS since August of 1975. I have rotated through just about every squad within the Investigations Branch of the INS at NYC during my tenure as a Special Agent. I spent several years, in the aggregate assigned to the Frauds Unit in which I was responsible to uncover a variety of fraud crimes involving INS issues, from fraud schemes carried out with the ultimate goal of obtaining LPR status and/or U.S. citizenship, to the use of fraudulent identity documents to otherwise circumvent the laws enforced by the INS.
In 1988 I was assigned to the Unified Intelligence Division of the New York office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. In this assignment I was responsible to work cooperatively with members of the DEA and other law enforcement personnel and analysts from a wide variety of other agencies including members of the NYPD, New York State Police, U.S. Customs Service, Internal Revenue Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and British Customs. My assignment here lasted for approximately 3 and a half years. During this assignment I decided to conduct a study on the individuals who were arrested by the DEA by reviewing DEA arrest records. We determined that approximately 60 percent of the individuals arrested by DEA and the DEA Task Force were identified as being ``foreign born.'' Nation-wide approximately 30 percent were identified as ``foreign born.'' For the 3 years that I tracked these statistics, there were only slight variations on the percentages. Although these numbers are now over 10 years old, I imagine that the percentages are probably not much different.
In 1991 I was promoted to my current position of Senior Special Agent and assigned to the OCDETF Unit (Organized Crime, Drug Enforcement Task Force). This assignment requires that I work with other agencies to investigate, apprehend and prosecute aliens who are involved in narcotics trafficking and related crimes.
The INS is charged with the responsibility of enforcing laws that govern the entry of aliens into the United States as well as those laws that are involved in the granting of Lawful Permanent Resident Alien status to aliens and to the bestowing of U.S. citizenship on aliens.
It is often said that you only get one opportunity to make a first impression. Generally speaking, the first laws that aliens entering the United States encounter are those laws that the INS is supposed to enforce. When the INS fails to effectively, consistently and fairly enforce these laws, we are sending a very dangerous message to aliens seeking to enter the United States. In effect we are telling them that not only can they expect to get away with violating our laws, they can anticipate being rewarded for violating our laws!
I have come to think of the INS law enforcement program as a tripod. The Border Patrol is responsible for enforcing the laws between ports of entry, the Immigration Inspectors are charged with the responsibility of enforcing the laws at ports of entry and the Special Agents are supposed to back up both of the other two divisions. Each of these components of the enforcement program, in my opinion, need to be emphasized equally. Just as a camera's tripod needs to have three legs of equal length, the enforcement tripod needs to rest equally on each of its three legs. If you shorten one of the legs on your camera's tripod, it falls over. This is the reality of the INS enforcement program. It seems that each time the call goes out to tighten up on the enforcement of the immigration laws, the typical response is to hire more border patrol agents. I am a great fan of the Border Patrol, they do dangerous and difficult work, however, if we do not also boost resources allocated to the interior enforcement mission, the entire enforcement program becomes ineffective. Aliens who are illegally in the United States don't only come to this country by running the border. Often, they obtain visas under assumed identities or violate the terms under which they were admitted after they enter the United States. As we have seen with the terrorists, most of them, from what I have read, appear to have entered the United States with visas that were issued by the State Department and then engaged in their treacherous missions. The task of tracking down such aliens is purely the domain of the Special Agents.
We also need to exploit technology to help us to track aliens entering and departing the United States. We need to also use this technology to help prevent aliens and other criminals from creating multiple identities for themselves, further complicating the law enforcement efforts of the INS as well as other law enforcement organizations.
We have heard calls recently for the implementation of a student tracking system. We have similarly heard calls for the INS to keep gabs on non-immigrants who violate their terms of admission (or immigration status). I couldn't agree more with these goals, however, I would like to know who is supposed to do this work? If we simply enter this information in a computerized database, we certainly will become aware of violations of the Immigration laws, but then what? I presume that the goal of establishing a tracking system would be done to enable the INS to remove those aliens who violate their Immigration status, however, without a cadre of dedicated Special Agents, who will do the job? Currently, according to published statistics there are fewer that 2000 Special Agents of the INS nation-wide. At the present time, there are approximately 100 Special Agents to cover the southern half of the state of New York, including New York City.
Clearly this situation is untenable. We need to have many more Special Agents. We also need to have an agency that functions effectively. At present, each district office operates more as a franchise than as a component of a paramilitary organization. While I agree that each office needs to have some autonomy to take regional variations into account, the over-all functioning of the agency should stress a direct chain of command from Headquarters to each and every field agent throughout the United States. Each employee needs to feel that he or she is within the chain of command to headquarters and the level of accountability should be directly proportionate with the level that the employ works at. That is to say, the higher up the chain of command, the more accountable the employee needs to be. Issues of morale and attrition rates which have been, in my experience, virtually ignored, can no longer be ignored. A considerable sum of money is spent on recruiting and training each law enforcement officer of the INS. Special Agents require several years from the time they are hired to the time when they are truly ``up to speed'' and possess the skills and abilities that they need to do their difficult and complex jobs. However, for many reasons, highly qualified agents often leave the INS shortly after they complete their training at the Academy. This revolving door is not cost effective and helps to erode morale and efficiency in those offices which suffer from high attrition rates. It would seem that when Special Agents resign they should be given formal exit interviews to identify the issues which caused them to leave. To my knowledge, this is not being done. Often the agents who leave go on to other agencies where many of them develop successful careers.
The role of the Special Agents is vital. When our nation was attacked on September 11, 2001, the danger posed by terrorists became all too clear, however, various criminal
[Page: E2244] GPO's PDF
Please understand, I am not opposed to the lawful entry of aliens who come to the United States to share the ``American Dream'', I only take issue with those who come here in violation of law and who end up creating America's nightmares. Indeed, my own mother was welcomed by this country shortly before the Second World War, enabling her to survive, while her mother, for whom I am named, perished in the Holocaust. We simply need to know who we are admitting and having an agency that possesses the resources to not only tracks aliens who end up violating their Immigration status, but also has the resources to track them down and ultimately, when appropriate, remove them from the United States. This capability is a matter of nothing less than national security.
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