Napolitano accused of falsifying border security data by lawmaker

Jim Kouri
Law Enforcement Examiner


Napolitano remains on the
defensive against the GOP in
Congress and her own staff
serving at the U.S. borders. Credits: DHS/CBP

The chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said on Friday that he's still waiting for Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to respond to a disturbing accusation that she and her underlings at DHS released deceptive and inaccurate information about illegal aliens sneaking across borders into the United States.


Chairman Darrell Issa sent Napolitano a letter on March 1 saying it is investigating agency insiders’ tips that her department and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection “released false and misleading border crossing data.”

“Without an accurate measurement of how many illegal entrants become ‘got-aways,’ there is no way to assess the safety and security of the southwest border,” said the Napolitano letter.

“Got-aways” are border crossers who are not arrested or turned back when they enter the United States illegally, according to Issa.

The National Border Patrol Council also says the report is misleading and that the increase in drug seizures actually means the Mexican cartels are more active and smuggling more drugs into the U.S.

Apprehensions along U.S. borders were down more than 50 percent -- to about 350,000 -- since 2008. More than 87,000 of those apprehended had criminal histories. The decrease is due to a more secure border, which results in less people attempting to cross into the U.S. illegally, the Napolitano report said.

However, the NBPC claims the figures used by Napolitano and her staff are deceptive and can be attributed to more and more illegal aliens being successful at evading border agents. Also, there's a movement within the Customs and Border Protection directorate to create a "kinder, gentler" border patrol force.


"During mandatory Cultural and Environmental Awareness training that all Border Patrol agents must take, we learn that illegal aliens are now referred to as "cross-border violators". We further learn that we should carry lots of garbage bags and assist the "cross-border violators" in hauling out their trash and disposing of it properly," officials stated on the NBPC blog.


Union officials point to further evidence that Border Patrol field operations have been hijacked by politically correct bureaucrats and politicians in Washington, DC.
"We are glad to know that the huge army of Border Patrol staff officer bureaucrats in D.C. are busy finding new ways to try to lobotomize rank-and-file agents so they can be transformed into politically correct robots who are afraid to make a decision or aggressively enforce the laws of this country. After all, too many arrests of "cross-border violators" would not look good for another massive amnesty program," according to NBPC officials.


In his letter to Napolitano, Issa quotes Shawn Moran, a senior border patrol agent stationed in the San Diego sector and vice president of the National Border Patrol labor union, in his interview with CNSNews:
“Any sort of metric that DHS comes up with I think is — I’m going to be skeptical about from the get-go. Until they actually address the problem of people who get past us and find a real way to measure that, they’re never going to have a real picture of what’s going on, on the border. I’ve heard for 14 years that I’ve been in this organization — in the border patrol — that we have 12 million illegal aliens in this country.”


“Well, I don’t think that’s true because I know that there are hundreds of thousands getting past us every year, so there’s no way that number has remained static.”
Issa's letter also alleges that “an analysis of a small sample of shift reports from the Casa Grande border patrol station in Arizona showed that over a one-week period in April 2011, at least 82 illegal entrants who were not arrested or turned back south were not reported as got-aways.”

Issa’s committee is demanding that Napolitano provide all situation reports, operation reports, and shift reports from the eight patrol stations in the Tucson sector written and submitted in 2011.