The new strategy? Giving up

Immigration agents are devolving into amnesty agents

Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff
Thursday, Aug 12, 2010

A group voted recently to declare that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has "abandoned the agency's core mission of enforcing U.S. immigration laws and providing for public safety," and is instead "campaigning for programs and policies related to amnesty."

Comment (1)

That's the good news.

The bad news is, the group that decided the federal government has given up on immigration enforcement is -- well, the agents themselves.

The National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents some 7,000 immigration officers and other ICE employees, voted 259-0 to condemn the agency's leaders in a no-confidence vote. It named Assistant Secretary John Morton and Phyllis Coven, assistant director for the agency's office of detention policy and planning.

Essentially, the rank and file immigration agents are saying your federal government has turned away from enforcing immigration laws.

What if air safety workers had said the Federal Aviation Authority had decided to stop regulating air safety? Or that any other federal agency's workers were on record -- unanimously and unambiguously -- saying their agency had stopped performing its core mission?

Number one, that's big news.

Number two, wouldn't it be illegal and unconstitutional? Isn't the executive branch charged with carrying out the laws of Congress?

Isn't immigration enforcement one of them? A fairly important one?

And wouldn't it be pretty cynical and ominous if the Obama administration were to use a federal agency for such sheer political ends? Oh, and illegal?

Mr. Obama has most unions in his back pocket. Apparently, this one fell out.

Good for them. And we owe them a debt of thanks for having the courage to stand up and tell a painful truth in a very public way.

Astoundingly, reports The Washington Times , the agents say:

- The majority of ICE's enforcement and removal officers are prohibited from making street arrests or enforcing U.S. immigration laws outside of the jail setting.

- Hundreds of ICE officers nationwide perform no law enforcement duties whatsoever because of resource mismanagement within the agency.

- ICE detention reforms have transformed into a detention system aimed at providing resortlike living conditions to criminal aliens based on recommendations not from ICE officers and field managers, but from "special-interest groups."

The union, reports the Times, says criminal aliens -- illegal immigrants who commit crimes in the U.S. -- "openly brag" that "they are taking advantage of a broken immigration system and will be back in the United States within days to commit crimes -- while U.S. citizens arrested for the same offenses serve prison sentences."

The federal immigration agency, the union says, now devotes "more time to campaigning for immigration reforms aimed at large-scale amnesty legislation than advising the American public and federal lawmakers on the severity of the illegal-immigration problems."

If any of this is true, it's an incredible scandal and an unforgivable and illegal breach of the trust Americans have put in the federal government to protect our safety and national security.

We doubt the Democratic Congress will have much interest in getting to the bottom of this. Perhaps a new Congress will next year.

http://chronicle.augusta.com/opinion/ed ... egy-giving