Thread: Navarette: ICE throwing up hands and declaring defeat

ICE throwing up hands and declaring defeat
August 26, 2008

SAN DIEGO -- Have you ever seen a giant surrender? It's pretty pathetic.

That's the word that comes to mind when a gargantuan government agency with more than 16,000 employees and a $5 billion annual budget suddenly throws up its hands and gives up on one of its major responsibilities. In fact, when that agency is U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, there is even a name for the act of surrender: Operation Scheduled Departure.

We are at the end of a 17-day pilot self-deportation program that ICE is trying out in San Diego and four other U.S. cities: Chicago, Phoenix, Charlotte, N.C., and Santa Ana, Calif. The program ended Aug. 22.

So far, not so good. There aren't many takers for the government's less-than-generous offer to allow 457,000 illegal immigrants without criminal records and who pose no threat to national security to voluntarily turn themselves in to federal authorities. Anyone who did want to schedule their own departure would be given 90 days to get their affairs in order and -- here's the part ICE doesn't advertise -- be outfitted with an electronic ankle bracelet to keep track of their whereabouts in the meantime.

The offer is being made to "fugitive aliens," people who have appeared before an immigration judge and been ordered to leave the country, but haven't complied with the deportation order.

That part isn't surprising. If the illegal immigrants are from Mexico, and the lion's share of them are, what awaits them at home isn't appealing -- the prospect of having to support their families on $6 per day when they could make 15 or 20 times that on this side of the border. Then there's the fact that, while ICE likes to project this image that it is roaming the countryside and "knocking on doors," I suspect that not that many doors actually get knocked on. In order to want to voluntarily leave the country, illegal immigrants have to have a realistic fear that they'll be picked up and that the process will be messier and perhaps more dangerous than the self-deportation route.

As it stands, most illegal immigrants are probably more likely to be struck by lightning than to ever be paid a visit by ICE. According to an ICE spokesman, last year the agency arrested about 30,000 fugitive aliens in the entire country. At that rate, it would take 400 years for the agency to clear through the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants now in the United States.

Do-nothingism is a reputation the agency has worked hard to build. Just ask any local or state police officer who, having run across an illegal immigrant and done his duty by calling ICE to pick him up, waited and waited only to eventually realize that no one was coming. Or ask any of those who were picked up in the recent series of immigration raids -- deservedly so, I might add -- but who had to watch those who had employed them, and in some cases allegedly abused them, get off without so much as a warning.

Clearly, ICE is suffering a meltdown. It is the result of an overhaul that the Immigration and Naturalization Service got after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and now it desperately needs an overhaul of its own.

Of course, it's the future we're talking about. It's too late for the crew that is there now. Julie Myers, assistant secretary of homeland security for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has been a disaster ever since she was nominated in 2005 when she was just 36. She is the niece of Richard Myers, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and she is married to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's former chief of staff. Julie Myers got into trouble even before her Senate confirmation when a Homeland Security employee showed up at a staff Halloween party dressed in prison stripes, dreadlocks and dark makeup. Later, digital photos from the party surfaced, despite the fact that Myers had ordered them erased. That was embarrassing. Now, by signing off on this ridiculous self-deport program, Myers has made the agency a laughingstock.

The next president needs to make it clear that he's serious about immigration enforcement by finding a serious person to head what needs to once again be thought of as a serious agency. But who would want the job now? Say, why not take a page from the agency's playbook and ask for volunteers?

Ruben Navarrette Jr., is a columnist and editorial board member of The San Diego Union Tribune, He is the author of "A Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano." He can be reached at ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com.

http://tinyurl.com/6fklc4

As an outrageous open borders activist, Ruben's simply engaging in a bit of wishful thinking. He makes a living by pandering to the illegal aliens from the homeland he wishes was for. He moved from Dallas to San Diego in order to be nearer his audience. You'll hear him screech in future columns about DHS's cruel treatment of his people. He's right about the fact that DHS is far too small to do this job. They need five times the agent force or total commitment by local law enforcement. I doubt anyone inside DHS really thought any sane illegal alien would voluntarily give up all the free stuff the libs give them. They'll have to be pried loose from those entitlements, perhaps one by one.

Originally Posted by Tom2

As an outrageous open borders activist, Ruben's simply engaging in a bit of wishful thinking. He makes a living by pandering to the illegal aliens from the homeland he wishes was for. He moved from Dallas to San Diego in order to be nearer his audience. You'll hear him screech in future columns about DHS's cruel treatment of his people. He's right about the fact that DHS is far too small to do this job. They need five times the agent force or total commitment by local law enforcement. I doubt anyone inside DHS really thought any sane illegal alien would voluntarily give up all the free stuff the libs give them. They'll have to be pried loose from those entitlements, perhaps one by one.

The only way this is going to be accomplished is to allow citizen groups to form and get official deputization from the government. This would never happen as our own government is too corrupt and would call citizens who want to do this "vigilantes" and "white supremacists". But this is what we get from a government more concerned about protecting cheap labor than the lives of its citizens.

Originally Posted by Tom2

I doubt anyone inside DHS really thought any sane illegal alien would voluntarily give up all the free stuff the libs give them. They'll have to be pried loose from those entitlements, perhaps one by one.

I think you would call it a "poison pill" provision. "Poison Pills" happen in the corporate world when a company that is functioning well becomes the object of a hostile takeover. In order to get revenge on the hostile buyer, the employees who are part of the companies will often do something like run up a bunch of debts all of a sudden in order to hurt the company so that once it is taken over there will be problems.

I have noticed that many of the "detainees" who are part of the "voluntary" program are being photographed with "ankle bracelet" electronic devices of the type that prisoners wear. This is a "poison pill" because the DHS know that the papers will run photos on the cruelty of treating Mexicans like prisoners and they know this will help destroy the program and generate interest in a "humane" guest worker program which is the real reason that Bush is running these showcase raids.

Everyday our own government gets worse and worse.

I hardly think that because the voluntary self-deportation program failed (did anyone think it would have succeeded?), that ICE has been "defeated". Ruben would like to think so, as would IA activists, but alas for you fellas, it means ENFORCEMENT will continue because it works.

VIVA ICE!

my post at article:

It doesn't sound at all as if I.C.E. has surrendered

I.C.E. took down another 350 criminal illegal aliens yesterday in Laurel, MS, and that is just the beginning of their new sweep.

GO I.C.E.!!!

THERE WILL BE NO AMNESTY!!!

OUR ACCEPTABLE IMMIGRATION REFORM

#1. Secure the Border!!!
#2. Mandate E-Verify for ALL Employees!!!
#3. Mandate E-Verify for ANY Benefit!!!
#4. Stop the Underground Economy!!!
#5. End Birthright Citizenship for Illegals!!!
......and make it retroactive!!!
#6. End Chain Migration!!!
#7. Make English our Official Language!!!
#8. Cut Off Federal Funds to Sanctuary Cities!!

NOTHING MORE!!! NOTHING LESS!!!

Ruben Navarrette Jr., is nothing more than a certified LA RAZA shill. He can be reached at ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com.

I am getting a little hopeful now that I see most Americans are starting to wake up and see the idiocy of the "they watch your children, they clean your toilets" excuse that Limousine Liberals like Ted Kennedy put forward. I can't remember a time in my memory in which politicians were so detested as they are today and they keep fighting back with one bad idea after another.

Laborers in Michigan are truly suffering from the job losses inflicted by illegals but all the politicians can worry about is how they snuck some slave laborer onto their wealthy estates and saved a dollar an hour to have their begonia patch weeded.

Read "The Decline and Fall of the Empire" by Edward Gibbon. All societies fall prey to crooks and psychopaths; but I have had the bad luck to see the US "fall" so quickly as it happened while we were asleep. When we ever get out of the situation we are in and I am seriously going to look into working in politics. This country deserves so much better than the spoiled rich kid politicians who think only of Mexican "rights" and laugh when they hear an American has been killed.

http://www.amazon.com/Decline-Empire-Mo ... 0345478843

Also, free version online:

http://books.google.com/books?id=iHgLAA ... &ct=result

read about Commodus, he will remind of George W. Bush, and read about the Islamic invasion of Rome, it was just like 9-11, but without passenger jets...

This doesn't look like I.C.E. threw up their hands in defeat.

FOXNEWS.COM HOME > BUSINESS

ICE: Nearly 600 detained in Miss. plant raid
Tuesday, August 26, 2008

By HOLBROOK MOHR, Associated Press Writer

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LAUREL, Miss. — Federal officials say nearly 600 suspected illegal immigrants were detained in a raid on a manufacturing plant in southern Mississippi, making it the largest such sweep in the country.

A spokeswoman says more than 100 of those caught up in Monday's raid on Howard Industries were released based on humanitarian concerns, mostly because they have children.

Most of the rest were transferred to a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Jena, La. Nine 17-year-olds were transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

The Mississippi raid was one of a series of recent high-profile crackdowns on illegal immigrants. In May, officials swept into the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa and detained 400 workers.

http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2008Aug26/ ... id,00.html