A Terrible Move on the Part of CBP and DHS!!

Editor’s Note: Law Enforcement, the public, and the United States in general, will rue the day that the Long Green Line of the Border Patrol has been severed for political and short-sighted reasons. With proven outstanding leadership within the organization, the appointment of an outsider can only reflect the continued negative attitude of this Administration to weaken enforcement at every quarter. The attack on this great organization as outlined in the following newspaper article from political and biased voices is shameful.

Ben Ferro (Editor, InsideINS.com)

benferro@insideins.com

In An Attempt To Stem Abuses, The Border Patrol Gets A New Chief — From The FBI

By Brian Bennett, The Los Angeles Times

A senior FBI official was named chief of the long-troubled U.S. Border Patrol on Monday in an effort to curb abuses, investigate corruption and improve discipline within the 21,000-member force.

Mark Morgan, who heads the FBI training division, is the first outsider to lead the Border Patrol in its 92-year history.

He inherits a force under fire for ignoring or downplaying shootings of unarmed people and other abuses by agents, and of doing too little to stem corruption by drug cartels, smugglers and other criminals.

The Border Patrol is responsible for securing the nation’s borders. Driven by concerns about national security, the number of agents and other personnel has grown dramatically in the last 15 years.

Critics say that has led to a lack of accountability and an array of other problems, from excessive use of force to racial profiling.

In a statement, R. Gil Kerlikowske, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, praised Morgan’s “strong law enforcement and leadership credentials.”

Morgan’s career has included stints as a Los Angeles Police Department officer, as a deputy sheriff in Platt County, Mo., and 20 years at the FBI.

He ran an FBI-led Hispanic gang task force in the Los Angeles field office that focused on MS-13 and 18th Street gangs. He also held senior FBI roles in Baghdad, Iraq; New Haven, Conn.; and El Paso, Texas.

Most recently, Morgan headed training at the FBI’s training center in Quantico, Va., and at FBI headquarters in Washington.

FBI Director James Comey said in a statement that Morgan brought “passion for justice and public service” to his work.

Morgan also led the internal affairs office at Customs and Border Protection in 2014, a post that put him at odds with the Border Patrol’s insular culture.

Officials say he helped internal affairs overhaul how abuse cases are investigated, identified weaknesses in how agents were trained to use force, and pushed to get greater authority for internal affairs officers.

Morgan’s appointment immediately took flak from the Border Patrol’s powerful union, however. It complained that Kerlikowske had ignored viable candidates within the force.

“How can someone who has never made an immigration arrest in his career expect to lead an agency whose primary duty is to make immigration arrests?” asked Joshua Wilson, a spokesman for the union’s local chapter in San Diego.

The union had urged Kerlikowske to choose Ronald D. Vitiello, a veteran of the Border Patrol who has served as acting chief. Vitiello improved new shift rotation schedules, Wilson said.

Some advocates of tougher immigration actions also criticized the selection of an FBI veteran over an internal candidate.

“It basically is saying that the existing border agents don't know what they are doing and need an outsider to come in from a totally separate branch of law enforcement and tell them how to do their jobs — it's offensive,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations for NumbersUSA, a Virginia-based advocacy group that lobbies to reduce immigration levels.

By almost any measure, the Border Patrol’s problems are significant.

In March, for example, an independent task force said in a report that the system for disciplining abusive or corrupt Border Patrol agents is “deeply flawed.”

A separate independent review of 67 uses of deadly force made public in 2014 found that some agents had deliberately stepped in front of cars to justify shooting at drivers and had fired weapons at people throwing rocks from the Mexican side of the border.

“It is not a secret that the Border Patrol has major accountability problems resulting from years of unchecked abuse,” James Lyall, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer in Tucson, said in a telephone interview.

Morgan “needs to act promptly to implement modern law enforcement best practices that the Border Patrol has resisted for far too long,” Lyall said.

The incompetence of this woman is absolutely frightening!!!!

Islamic jihadists are on the march and 14 people were massacred in San Bernardino, yet DHS seems clueless about what is going on with potential threats to our security. Watch DHS testify before the National Security Subcommittee yesterday.
Posted by Congressman Ron DeSantis on Friday, December 11, 2015

Huh????DHS not invited?????

FBI Holds “Special” Meeting in Juárez to Address ISIS, DHS Not Invited!

Responding to Judicial Watch’s report earlier this week of ISIS activity along the Mexican border, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) supervisors called a “special” meeting at the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juárez.

A high-level intelligence source, who must remain anonymous for safety reasons, confirmed that the meeting was convened specifically to address a press strategy to deny Judicial Watch’s accurate reporting and identify who is providing information to JW. FBI supervisory personnel met with Mexican Army officers and Mexican Federal Police officials, according to JW’s intelligence source. The FBI liaison officers regularly assigned to Mexico were not present at the meeting and conspicuously absent were representatives from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It’s not clear why DHS did not participate.

Publicly, U.S. and Mexico have denied that Islamic terrorists are operating in the southern border region, but the rapid deployment of FBI brass in the aftermath of JW’s report seems to indicate otherwise. A Mexican Army field grade officer and a Mexican Federal Police Inspector were among the sources that confirmed to JW that ISIS is operating a camp just a few miles from El Paso, Texas. The base is around eight miles from the U.S. border in an area known as “Anapra” situated just west of Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

Another ISIS cell to the west of Ciudad Juárez, in Puerto Palomas, targets the New Mexico towns of Columbus and Deming for easy access to the United States, the same knowledgeable sources confirm. During the course of a joint operation last week, Mexican Army and federal law enforcement officials discovered documents in Arabic and Urdu, as well as “plans” of Fort Bliss – the sprawling military installation that houses the US Army’s 1st Armored Division. Muslim prayer rugs were recovered with the documents during the operation.

“Coyotes” engaged in human smuggling – and working for the Juárez Cartel – help move ISIS terrorists through the desert and across the border between Santa Teresa and Sunland Park, New Mexico. To the east of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, cartel-backed “coyotes” are also smuggling ISIS terrorists through the porous border between Acala and Fort Hancock, Texas. These specific areas were targeted for exploitation by ISIS because of their understaffed municipal and county police forces, and the relative safe-havens the areas provide for the unchecked large-scale drug smuggling that was already ongoing.

Last August JW reported that ISIS, operating from Ciudad Juárez, was planning to attack the United States with car bombs or other vehicle borne improvised explosive devices (VBIED). High-level U.S. federal law enforcement, intelligence and other sources confirmed then that a warning bulletin for an imminent terrorist attack on the border had been issued. Agents across a number of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense agencies were placed on alert and instructed to aggressively work all possible leads and sources concerning the imminent terrorist threat.

Reprinted from the Judicial Watch blog (www.judicialwatch.org)

Ben Ferro (editor, insideins.com)

benferro@insideins.com

If Morale’s So Bad, Let's Study It Until It Gets Better‏

DHS tackles endless morale problems with seemingly endless studies

By Jerry Markon, The Washington Post

Afflicted with the lowest morale of any large federal agency, the Department of Homeland Security did what comes naturally to many in government.

It decided to study the problem. And then study it some more.

The first study cost about $1 million. When it was finished, it was put in a drawer. The next one cost less but duplicated the first. It also ended up in a drawer.

So last year, still stumped about why the employees charged with safeguarding Americans are so unhappy, the department commissioned two more studies.

Now, with the nation continuing to face threats to the homeland, some officials who have worked inside the agency acknowledge it should spend less time studying its internal problems and more energy trying to fix them.

“There’s really no excuse for the department expending finite resources on multiple studies, some at the same time, to tell the department pretty much what everyone has concluded: that there are four-to-five things that need to be done for morale,” said Chris Cummiskey, who left DHS in November after serving as its third-highest-ranking official. “You don’t need $2 million worth of studies to figure that out.”

Cummiskey added that DHS Secretary Jeh C. Johnson “understands this and is focused on delivering meaningful results for DHS employees.”

Since taking over the department in late 2013, Johnson has focused on raising morale and stemming high turnover, problems that date to the George W. Bush administration. Many DHS employees have said in the annual government “viewpoint” survey of federal employees that their senior leaders are ineffective; that the department discourages innovation, and that promotions and raises are not based on merit. Others have described in interviews how a stifling bureaucracy and relentless congressional criticism makes DHS an exhausting, even infuriating, place to work.

Many of the frustrations stem from the way DHS was created, with 22 agencies from across the government urgently welded into one department after the 9/11 attacks. Employees today say those agencies still have clashing cultures and are subject to Byzantine congressional oversight, with more than 90 committees and subcommittees retaining some jurisdiction.

Johnson and Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have “personally committed themselves to improving the morale and workforce satisfaction across the Department of Homeland Security,” said Ginette Magana, a DHS spokeswoman. “They are directly engaging with employees, listening to their concerns, working diligently to improve employee recognition and training, and are focused on strengthening the skills and abilities of every employee. She said the studies “comprise a first step in a comprehensive process dedicated to tangible results.”

At the same time, the department has continued to pay for even more outside reports.

“It’s a big problem, not just at DHS but across the government,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group that seeks to make government more effective. “You see study, study, study and no execution or fulfilling of the recommendations.”

Stier’s group contributed to one of the most recent DHS studies, a $420,000 analysis completed late last year by the consulting firm Deloitte. But Stier said his help came with a caution. “It’s time to get moving,” he recalled telling department officials, “and not simply study the issue.”

‘We just hid it’

Three years ago, officials in the department’s office of health affairs, which provides expertise on national security medical issues, began to wonder about the health of one of their own programs. In response to low scores on the viewpoint survey, officials had set up a program, DHSTogether, aimed at making DHS “one of the best places to work in the Federal government.” But it wasn’t working out.

So the department tapped the Institute of Medicine, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences, to find out why.

A committee of 11 experts visited about 25 DHS locations in Texas, New York and the Washington area. It produced a 268-page report under a contract, which allocated $588,000 for the work. About $500,000 in additional funds for the study came out of another line item in the contract, according to contracting documents and a source familiar with them.

The result: virtually nothing.

“It was not a very good light to shine on any of us, so we just hid it,” said one DHS employee familiar with the report, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retaliation by supervisors.

The report, released in September 2013, concluded that DHSTogether had been starved of money and support from DHS leaders and devolved into little more than an ineffective suicide prevention program. The document made a series of recommendations to improve employee resilience and morale, calling it “imperative that senior leaders at DHS” get more involved.

One of those leaders was Rafael Borras, who had just taken over as acting deputy secretary, the department’s No. 2 post. “I’ve never seen it, never heard of it, didn’t know they were doing it,” he recalled. “At no time did anyone raise with me, ‘Oh, remember this study we did?’ ”

A DHS official said the department has taken several steps in response to the institute’s study. These include setting up a leadership council, embarking on further research to measure employee resilience, and drafting a five-year strategic plan for DHS workforce “readiness and resilience,” as the study had urged.

When a congressional committee asked a year ago about what had come of the institute’s study, DHS officials also cited the five-year plan, saying it would be presented to senior managers by May 2014.

Nearly a year later, that strategic plan remains merely a draft in DHS’s computer system. A copy of a draft, obtained by The Washington Post, contains phrases such as “add introduction,” “add conclusion” and “insert photos.”

“There is no plan,” said one DHS employee. “It just sat there and sat there and it sits today. We are clearly just running around doing studies, getting recommendations and not taking them.”

Overlapping surveys

The same month in 2012 that department officials signed the contract with the Institute of Medicine, they commissioned someone else to study virtually the same issues. DHS’s office of health affairs awarded a $250,000 contract to the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress (CSTS) at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., to examine the DHSTogether program and the mental well-being of employees.

Though the contract has been extended twice, people familiar with it said the center produced nothing more than a short draft in August.

The draft offers an explanation for why the center had not made more progress. “Other entities had already engaged employees in efforts to assess morale,” it said, and as a result, DHS employees were developing “interview/survey fatigue.”

The document continued, “Several other studies with significant overlap to CSTS’s work efforts were underway at the same time.”

A department spokeswoman said the center’s study is also expected to produce other steps, including employee resilience training and a briefing to senior DHS leadership.

DHS employees say the draft itself has been ignored inside the department.

Even more studies

Over the last year, the department’s concern with morale has intensified. The 2014 Best Places To Work in the Federal Government Survey, published by Stier’s group, ranked DHS dead last among large agencies.

And the department has launched two more studies.

The Deloitte analysis, which focused on “employee engagement,” was finished late last year.

People familiar with the contract said Deloitte focused on the Senior Executive Service — the government’s top career managers — who have been leaving DHS at a high rate in recent years.

Deloitte delivered a set of recommendations to DHS leaders late last year. A spokeswoman for the firm referred questions to DHS. A DHS spokeswoman said the firm’s work built on the previous studies and had produced an “implementation plan,” but declined to elaborate.

Just as Deloitte was completing its report, Fairfax-based professional services firm ICF was starting a separate morale study of the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, the department’s research and development arm, according to interviews and agency documents.

An internal e-mail, sent to the directorate’s employees in December, described the $250,000 study as a “follow-up survey” to the annual viewpoint survey. For the past several years, the science and technology directorate has ranked especially low, even compared with other parts of DHS.

Dozens of directorate employees have been interviewed about their morale by ICF as part of an effort, as described by another internal e-mail, to “identify and prioritize those areas where S&T can undertake corrective action by engaging directly with S&T federal employees.”

After the study is done, that e-mail added, ICF will follow up on the results — with another study.

Ben Ferro

benferro@insideins.com

ANOTHER POLITICIAN WHO THINKS HE’S THE SMARTEST GUY IN THE ROOM!!

What’s Next, Governor O’Malley? Sanctuary for Illegal Aliens in Government Buildings?

O'Malley Takes Aim At Deportations

Governor orders a change in policy on federal 'detainer' requests at Baltimore jail

By John Fritze, The Baltimore Sun

April 19, 2014

Gov. Martin O'Malley announced Friday that the Baltimore City Detention Center will no longer automatically honor requests from the federal government to hold immigrants for deportation — making the state-run jail one of a relative handful in the country to take a more discerning approach on such requests.

The move is intended to reduce deportations of immigrants who do not have criminal records under a federal program called Secure Communities.

The program, run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is supposed to identify repeat and violent offenders for deportation. But a Baltimore Sun analysis this year found that more than 40 percent of those deported in Maryland had no prior criminal record — far higher than the national average.

Baltimore joins California, Connecticut, the District of Columbia and others in reviewing requests from ICE to hold immigrants for up to 48 hours beyond when they would ordinarily be released.

Advocates say such "detainer" requests are often filed on immigrants who have deep ties in the community and no criminal record.

Under the new policy, which begins immediately, Baltimore will honor the requests only in cases in which an immigrant has been charged with or convicted of a felony, three or more misdemeanors or a "serious" misdemeanor — roughly those that Secure Communities was originally intended to target.

Those wanted only for immigration violations are to be released from the jail once they have satisfied the requirements of their pending charge.

"We will focus our efforts on complying with ICE detainers when there is an actual threat to the public's safety," the governor said. "No family should be ripped apart because the Republican Congress can't come to the table and reach a reasonable compromise on comprehensive immigration reform."

The decision is a significant step for O'Malley, who is considering a run for president in 2016.

The Democratic governor had received praise from advocates for signing a law in 2011 to allow immigrants in this country without legal documents to attend state colleges and universities at in-state tuition rates, and for backing a measure last year to let them apply for drivers licenses.

The head of the state's largest immigrant-rights group applauded O'Malley's announcement Friday.

"Martin O'Malley exemplifies the best principles of great leaders — honoring diversity, taking leadership when others fail, and executing decisive action when needed," said Gustavo Torres, executive director of CASA de Maryland.

Opponents said the move could allow immigrants who have criminal backgrounds to be set free rather than being turned over to ICE for further investigation. They said O'Malley's decision will make it harder for the federal government to enforce immigration laws.

Those affected, critics say, broke the law by entering the United States illegally in the first place.

"It has nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with obstructing enforcement of immigration laws," said Jessica M. Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies. The Washington-based think tank supports tighter immigration controls.

"Marylanders should be outraged that Governor O'Malley has put the interests of immigration scofflaws ahead of their legitimate interest in having immigration laws enforced, which protects jobs and public safety," she said.

Under Secure Communities, immigration officials access the fingerprints of everyone who is arrested, anywhere in the country, be it for murder or driving without a license. The Department of Homeland Security checks those prints against a database of people known to be in the country illegally.

When Department of Homeland Security computers turn up a match, federal agents ask the local jail to hold the immigrant for up to 48 hours beyond the time he or she would otherwise be released so a pickup can be arranged.

Under U.S. law, immigration violations are often civil matters, not criminal offenses.

ICE officials have pointed to cases in which the Secure Communities program has identified criminals, and they have said repeatedly that the agency's priority remains repeat and violent offenders.

In response to O'Malley's announcement, the agency released a statement Friday saying it "will continue to work cooperatively with law enforcement partners throughout Maryland as the agency seeks to enforce its priorities through the identification and removal of convicted criminals and others who are public safety threats."

O'Malley's decision follows an exchange of letters with Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson after The Sun published its articles.

The governor wrote Johnson in February seeking an explanation for Maryland's high numbers. In a separate letter to Johnson on Friday, the governor wrote that his "concerns about ICE's enforcement priorities are undiminished."

Most counties in Maryland honor the ICE requests.

Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler has concluded that compliance is optional. His office wrote in October that federal rules allow "state and local jurisdictions to exercise discretion when determining how to respond to individual detainers."

The General Assembly considered legislation this year to delineate when a jurisdiction could honor the request and when it would be required to release an immigrant.The O'Malley administration did not take a position on the bill, which failed to advance. O'Malley's move is limited to the Baltimore jail, which the state manages, but the decision opens the door to county officials in Maryland.

Sirine Shebaya, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland who has followed the issue closely, said the decision could set an important precedent for the rest of the state.

"This is a huge step forward that we hope will lead other counties to follow suit as we continue to advocate for the enactment of a similar policy statewide," she said.

Officials in Baltimore, Anne Arundel, Frederick and Prince George's counties either could not be reached late Friday for comment or were not immediately prepared to respond. Unlike warrants, immigration detainers are not signed by judges and meet no standard of probable cause — and several federal courts have started to look at them critically. A federal judge in Oregon ruled last week that the detainers violate the Fourth Amendment, prompting several jurisdictions there to announce that they would no longer honor them.

O'Malley's decision comes as hope has dwindled that Congress will pass legislation this year to broadly address an immigration system that advocates and critics alike describe as "broken."

President Barack Obama has instructed Johnson to review immigration enforcement policies and suggest ways to make them "more humane."

Democrats are scrambling ahead of the midterm elections to ease concerns from some Hispanic groups that the Obama administration has not done enough to stem the deportations of immigrants who could qualify for legal residency under a bipartisan immigration overhaul approved by the Senate last year.

Ben Ferro

benferro@insideins.com

Judge Claims DHS Delivering Smuggled Children To Illegal Immigrant Parents!

A federal judge in Texas is accusing the Department of Homeland Security of hand-delivering children smuggled into the United States to their illegal immigrant parents.

U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen revealed the practice in a blistering court order filed late last week. He said the "dangerous" practice is effectively aiding human traffickers and particularly the drug cartels, which run many of these operations.

"These actions are both dangerous and unconscionable," he wrote.

The judge attempted to lift the curtain on what is happening behind the scenes of the Obama administration's changing approach to immigration enforcement. It has been well-documented that DHS is allowing some illegal immigrants already inside the country to skirt deportation, and particularly those who came to the U.S. as children.

But the "conspiracy" outlined by Hanen would take that controversial policy a big step further. He detailed the case of an illegal immigrant parent in Virginia, but used that as an entry point to describe what he suggested was a broader program.

Hanen claimed that, in more than one case before his court, immigration officials are arresting human traffickers smuggling children into the U.S. -- and then "delivering the minors to the custody of the parent illegally living in the United States."

"The DHS has simply chosen not to enforce the United States' border security laws," he wrote.

Further, he said this is simply encouraging risky smuggling operations. "Time and again this court has been told by representatives of the government and the defense that cartels control the entire smuggling process," Hanen wrote. "... the government is not only allowing [illegal immigrants in the U.S.] to fund the illegal and evil activities of these cartels, but is also inspiring them to do so."

He added: "To put this in another context, the DHS policy is as logical as taking illegal drugs or weapons that it has seized from smugglers and delivering them to the criminals who initially solicited their illegal importation/exportation. Legally, this situation is no different."

Representatives with the Department of Homeland Security and other immigration agencies have not yet returned a request for comment on the judge's statement.

Chris Crane, president of the National ICE Council union, told FoxNews.com the judge's claims are "absolutely correct."

"This is exactly what's happening," he said, describing how agents "can't keep up" with the number of minors crossing the border, either by themselves or in the custody of smugglers. Crane said immigration officials, then, are tasked with finding a place for the children to go.

"That's what we do now. We babysit kids and change diapers," he said. "It's out of control."

Crane said the best short-term solution would be to return the children to the family members they were staying with in their home country.

The judge's statement was prompted by the case of Mirtha Veronica Nava-Martinez. She was arrested at the Texas-Mexico border in May and pleaded guilty to trying to smuggle a 10-year-old child originally from El Salvador. After the sentencing, the judge wrote, he decided to go public with additional details from the case.

He wrote that the "conspiracy" started when an illegal immigrant in Virginia hired smugglers to get her daughter from El Salvador to Virginia. She paid $6,000 in advance. But after the smuggling operation was interrupted by federal agents, he wrote, "the DHS delivered the child to her."

Further, he wrote, this was the fourth case he'd seen in as many weeks along these lines. In one case, he claimed, the U.S. government "flew a child to multiple locations" in the U.S. at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. "This is an absurd and illogical result," he wrote.

The judge noted that after the court inquired about the incidents, a federal prosecutor apparently "requested" that the mother in Virginia be placed in immigration proceedings. He said it's unclear whether that has happened, and he's been told the government will not pursue prosecution.

Hanen wrote that he is "not unsympathetic" to the parents in these cases, but noted the danger these children are put in.

"If [DHS officials] persist in this policy, more children are going to be harmed, and the DHS will be partly responsible because it encourages this kind of Russian roulette," he wrote.

Story by Judson Berger (FoxNews.com)

Ben Ferro

benferro@InsideINS.com