Thread: Ex-ICE Agent: Feds Seem Indifferent to Human Trafficking

Video at source link.
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Friday, March 20, 2015 04:19 PM
By: Sean Piccoli

American businesses hungry for cheap, undocumented immigrant labor are enablers if not members of violent criminal rings that also traffic in illegal drugs and indentured servitude, but federal authorities appear to have other priorities regarding border control, says a former immigration and customs agent.

"There used to be a huge priority for human trafficking and smuggling," A.J. Irwin, formerly with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner on Newsmax TV on Friday, referring to the agency's office of investigation.

"We called it smuggling, and now it's called human trafficking because, obviously, there's been people who have been victimized — such as these people who are smuggled and fraudulently tricked into working in indentured servitude," said Irwin.

"Why isn't there something being done about it?" he said. "I know agents who tried to do something about it, but they don't receive as much support as someone who would be doing an investigation of a narcotics trafficker or a trafficker of microchips or of counterfeit T-shirts. It just doesn't seem to be a priority in the agency anymore."

Irwin was lead case agent in United States v. Pappas, which in 1997 yielded the largest corporate criminal fine for immigration violations in U.S. history, against the southwestern Pappas restaurant chain for hiring undocumented workers.

Irwin said that as an agent he led probes into companies shopping for cheap labor.

"They sponsor the alien to come into the country, and that's not just people from Mexico — that's people from all over the world." he said.

"A smuggling fee, let's just say, is $10,000," he said. "Most of these people don't have $10,000, so they have to come up with the money somehow — pay half or pay in stages. Sometimes an employer will pay the smuggling fee and then when the employee safely arrives at the location, the employee is required to work for free until that smuggling fee is paid back."

He said he believes that this still goes on, and that some U.S. businesses are dealing directly with cross-border human traffickers.

"The border, on both sides, is a dangerous place," said Irwin. "And it's a business that is controlled by cartels, whether they be narcotics or human traffickers. To move people like that through the border, the dessert, the river, it's almost always an organized smuggling business.

"And when they're smuggling, there's money involved," he said. "Whether it's being paid by prospective employers or family members, it's a business, no doubt."

Irwin also questioned this week's Senate testimony from a U.S. Border Patrol agent charging that he and his co-workers are punished if they report sightings of illegal alien groups larger than 20 coming across the border.

"I don't buy it, not at all," said Irwin. "It's an exaggeration."

"I don't believe that the Border Patrol are misleading when they're reporting their statistics," he said.

But immigration "is such a hot-button issue right now," he said, that the political uproar may be coloring how agents and their superiors interpret what's happening on the ground.

"People on different sides of the issues can manipulate the statistics to serve whatever their agenda is," he said.

"The border patrol has different ways of determining the 'got-aways,' if you want to call them that — the people that they don't apprehend," Irwin explained.

"When a line agent sees signs or other indications that a group of more than 20 has crossed into the United States illegally, then for the Border Patrol to report this, they bring a supervisor out simply to corroborate the information.

"It's not that they doubt the line agent, it's just that they're trying to — it's CYA, basically," he said.

He added: "When there's an indication of 20 or more people crossing the border on foot, as we're talking about today, that is almost in every instance an indication of an organized human trafficking scheme. People do not just get together."

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsmax-Tv/A-.../20/id/631599/

The human smugglers are the cartels. The cartels control the border, they determine who gets in and how they get in. The cartels control the illegal immigration issue in the US, they control some police departments, they control these 501 C 3 tax frauds, they control a large number of politicians, they control the White House, they control some State Houses, they control any fool who wants to support amnesty, clamor for deferred action and special treatment of illegal aliens, who refuse to defund DHS to stop Obama Amnesty, who refuse to demand that the US government enforce our laws and deport illegal aliens, they control the whole issue. Yes, it's about greed, but it's not employer greed, there's not enough savings in it for them to offset the risk, it's about the cartels, who yes probably control the businesses who are paying the smuggling fees, because the cartels have protection lined up, and they've proven themselves very adept at providing it for those who play their game with them. GW Bush prosecuted only 10 or less employers for hiring illegal aliens during the first 6 years of his Presidency. Clinton prosecuted hundreds of companies starting his first year in office and increased that number of prosecutions every year such that by the end of his Administration, he prosecuted almost 900 companies in his last year of office.

Obviously, I'm no fan of Bill Clinton, but he did go after the employers. On the downside, he's the one who came up with this stupid TIN so illegal aliens could file tax returns and qualify for tax credit welfare. I don't remember illegal immigration being an issue in the 90's, even though it was, it just hadn't spread to where I was or I hadn't moved into where it was. The first time I noticed it on the streets was in 2002 in North Carolina when Governor Easley allowed illegal aliens to get driver's license and I was getting mine. To my shock, the license office was packed with non-english speakers, Hispanics, skipping out with driver's licenses. I also noticed Walmart was packed on Fridays with them, and construction sites that had been American workers, blacks and whites mostly, were now all Hispanic workers.

And I thought to myself, what is going on here? And a couple of years later there was the issue of in-state tuition for illegal aliens, and that's when I started to get involved with trying to stop this nonsense. It was a couple of years later that I made the connection between the cartels, the War on Drugs, and illegal immigration.

We're in a bind, folks, a big one, but we can and will overcome this problem. We will get it under grasp, solve it, and ensure this travesty never ever happens again in and to the United States of America. And as disappointed as we all were and still are with the failure of Congress to hold the line and stand our ground with regards to DHS defunding to stop Obama Amnesty, there's more than one way to solve it, and the other ways are still available including another round of DHS funding coming up shortly. I hope with all my heart the Courts support the Texas lawsuit, I'm just not confident at all in the US Supreme Court on immigration issues due to their track record, so we need to prepare for a defeat there, and be ecstatically surprised if the States win. But even then, it only stops Obama Amnesty, it still doesn't solve the problem, so we must be vigilant and keep up the pressure on the States, Congress and the 2016 elections.

Remember, the reason this problem is so hard to solve is the core issues of treason and corruption by the US government and numerous other political subdivisions from states to counties to municipalities. Americans have never faced anything like this before, so it's new territory and dealing it with means we have to change ourselves to change our governments. We can no longer rely on anything they say, and often we can't even rely upon what they claim they are doing, because much of it is masked, designed to appear one way when it's really going the other. This is our Period of Ironies and Opposites. So keep your eyes and ears open for the tricks, the schemes, the plots, the imposters, because unfortunately at this point ... they're everywhere.

I know we need to end all of the corruption and the greed which is leading to all of this mess that is going on in our nation. Thank you for the information and only hope that more individuals realize soon what is happening and start fighting against what is happening in our nation.

Assuming the feds are turning a blind eye to human trafficking, it is not a reach to grasp. It hastens more and more aliens arriving. What's to second guess? Absolutely nothing. America needs war and it is coming fast!