Thread: Report: Feds downplayed ICE case dismissals

Report: Feds downplayed ICE case dismissals

Report: Feds downplayed ICE case dismissals
Documents show agency had approval to dismiss some deportation cases
By SUSAN CARROLL
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
June 27, 2011, 1:04AM


Homeland Security officials misled the public and Congress last year in an effort to downplay a wave of immigration case dismissals in Houston and other cities amid accusations that they had created a "back-door amnesty," newly released records show.

The records, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, include a series of internal memos from Immigration and Customs Enforcement's chief counsel in Houston dated last August ordering attorneys to review all new, incoming cases and thousands already pending on the immigration court docket and to file paperwork to dismiss any that did not meet the agency's "top priorities."

The secretive review process resulted in the dismissal of hundreds of cases in Houston, most of them involving illegal immigrants who had lived in the United States for years without committing serious crimes.

A string of emails shows the dismissals had the blessings of top attorneys at ICE headquarters in Washington, D.C., last summer and that other ICE legal offices across the country were encouraged to consider measures to better use the agency's limited resources to target dangerous criminals.

The records also document for the first time that the agency quietly rescinded the Houston memo on Aug. 25 — the day the Houston Chronicle broke the story on the dismissals — amid allegations from conservatives that the Obama administration had created a stealth amnesty program for illegal immigrants.

ICE public affairs officials in Washington initially refused either to confirm or deny the dismissals, and then told several news outlets that they affected only a very narrow class of illegal immigrants with pending green card applications described in a different agency memo. After Senate Judiciary Committee members demanded an investigation last fall into the Houston dismissals, Homeland Security officials reiterated the same claim they made to the media.

However, the newly released documents show conclusively that government attorneys in Houston were given wide latitude to file motions to dismiss cases, including some involving immigrants with convictions for primarily misdemeanor offenses.

"It now appears that DHS attempted to mislead the public and Congress on its policy of directing dismissals of cases against criminal aliens," said Jessica Sandlin, Sen. John Cornyn's Texas press secretary. "After this failed attempt at stonewalling and obstruction of the public's right to know, the truth is now coming out."

Sandlin vowed to "get to the bottom" of the case dismissals, meaning ICE leadership may have to account to Congress for what some critics are calling an attempted cover-up by the agency.

ICE officials declined to answer a reporter's questions about whether they intentionally misled the news media, the general public or Congress in connection with the dismissals. In a statement, the agency's spokeswoman, Barbara Gonzalez, said the Houston memos "misconstrued and exceeded the agency's official guidance" on prosecutorial discretion and were rescinded quickly.

However, the internal records show the Houston office's efforts were praised internally by supervisors at ICE headquarters in Washington until news of the dismissals broke. And immigration court data shows the number of cases dismissed nationally grew by about 40 percent last fiscal year, with several courts scattered across the country reporting major increases.

Immigrant advocates praised the dismissals as a common-sense measure, but the more lenient shift in agency policy has prompted protests from within ICE's rank-and-file, with union officials accusing the administration of straying from its core mission to enforce the nation's immigration laws.

Tre Rebstock, president of the Houston ICE union, said he was concerned that the agency's leadership may have jeopardized public safety by dismissing some cases involving immigrants with criminal records. But Rebstock said he was equally concerned about the official reaction to the controversy, saying it had the hallmarks of a cover-up.

"As law enforcement officers, we are held to a higher standard than the public because we have the public's trust," Rebstock said. "And then they go and stand up in front of the Senate and throw all of their credibility out of the window when they say, 'Oh no, we weren't doing this. This wasn't our policy.'

"They did it," Rebstock said. "And then they lied - or misrepresented the truth, at the very least - about what they were doing."

The controversy dates to June 2010, when ICE Director John Morton issued a memo to all agency employees explaining that it had the resources to remove only about 400,000 illegal immigrants annually - less than 4 percent of the estimated illegal immigrant population.

Morton said ICE needed to prioritize the deportations of illegal immigrants to those who pose a risk to national security and public safety, recent illegal entrants and repeat immigration violators.

The records obtained by the Houston Chronicle show top ICE attorneys from across the country, including Gary L. Goldman, chief counsel for Houston, met in Denver at a two-day leadership conference in early August and discussed Morton's priorities, the agency's limited resources and the need to exercise prosecutorial discretion - the power to decide which immigration cases to pursue.

Goldman sent out a memo dated Aug. 12 to all his attorneys, ordering them to consider filing motions to dismiss cases that did not meet with the agency's top priorities. He also created a task force of attorneys to conduct a review of thousands of files on Houston's immigration court docket to determine whether they merited dismissal, the memo shows.

Moments after Goldman emailed the memo to his staff in Houston, he forwarded it to ICE leadership in Washington. Riah Ramlogan, then the acting field director for the ICE's legal office at agency headquarters, replied: "Outstanding, Gary," and asked him to share details of the local effort on the next national conference call for top ICE attorneys.

Within days, Houston immigration attorneys started getting copies of unsolicited motions to dismiss their clients' cases in the mail. Some reported appearing in court to find government attorneys requesting judges terminate removal proceedings in case after case. The dismissals involved a wide range of cases, from college students brought to the U.S. as children, to asylum-seekers, and to seriously ill immigrants.

It was unclear from the documents, some of which were heavily redacted, exactly how the Houston office handled cases involving illegal immigrants with criminal records. The memos instructed attorneys to consider the seriousness of the crimes and how long ago the illegal immigrants were convicted against other factors, the records show.

The documents included a redacted spreadsheet of 78 motions to dismiss filed by Houston ICE attorneys on behalf of immigrants with criminal convictions - ranging from minor traffic offenses to sexual assault.

ICE spokesman Brian Hale, who reviewed an unredacted copy of the spreadsheet, said several of the immigrants with the most serious criminal convictions - including sexual assaults and attempted murder - had their cases dismissed because they were found to be U.S. citizens. The list also included potential witnesses to crimes or fugitives whose cold cases were clogging up the docket, Hale said.

Other cases involved illegal immigrants who had lived in the U.S. for years and had relatively minor convictions, including traffic, drug and alcohol-related offenses, Hale said. Many of those cases involved people with U.S.-citizen relatives or other compelling humanitarian grounds for dismissals, such as a serious illness, he said.

In his memos, Goldman urged attorneys to err on the side of caution and not to exercise discretion "in cases where criminal activity or public safety is at issue."

The internal records show that Raphael Choi, Arlington's chief counsel, sent an Aug. 18 email to Goldman and the head of the Miami ICE office, praising them for leading the way on the dismissals and lamenting that he'd fallen "way behind."

"We continue to review cases piecemeal," Choi wrote. "The problem is every time I'm about to wield a blunt instrument to our docket, some case shows up in the press that gives me pause."

After the Chronicle's Aug. 25 story on the dismissals, Ramlogan, the ICE supervisor in Washington, ordered Goldman to rescind the Houston memo, the records show.

ICE public affairs officials in Washington told reporters from the New York Times, the Miami Herald and Fox News that the dismissals affected a very specific group of illegal immigrants described in an Aug. 20 memo from Morton, the ICE director. That memo instructed ICE attorneys nationwide to consider dismissing only cases involving immigrants in removal proceedings who had active green card applications.

The recently obtained records show that through Aug. 24, ICE officials in Houston had already reviewed 1,924 cases and filed motions to dismiss 246. An internal ICE memo shows the actual number of cases in which local attorneys exercised prosecutorial discretion was actually much higher by the end of October, however, involving a total of about 445 cases.

In late October, Cornyn and other GOP senators on the judiciary committee demanded more information on the Houston dismissals, accusing Homeland Security officials of "selectively enforcing the laws against only those aliens it considers a priority."

In a written response, a top DHS official assured the senators that "the directive you cited in your letter instructing ICE attorneys to seek the dismissals of immigration proceedings involving certain classes of criminal aliens does not exist." The DHS official, Nelson Peacock, the assistant secretary for legislative affairs, referenced the agency's Aug. 20 memo in his reply, saying it "affects very few aliens, generally non-criminals who have married a U.S. citizen."

Nationally, the numbers of cases dismissed increased about 40 percent during the 2010 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, over the previous year, according to an analysis of immigration court data by the Transactional Record Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

In Los Angeles, judges dismissed one in four cases, an increase of 200 percent over the previous year. Las Vegas also had a roughly 195 percent increase, and Dallas, Atlanta and Arlington all reported a more than 50 percent, the TRAC data shows.

ICE officials noted that judges likely dismissed some cases based on insufficient evidence and not just because of requests by government attorneys.

Locally, ICE is now granting very few dismissal requests and providing conflicting information on which cases may qualify, said Raed Gonzalez, the Houston liaison between the immigration court system and the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

ICE agreed to dismiss only two of the last 20 of his cases that Gonzalez argued merited prosecutorial discretion - a huge change from last summer when he saw case after case terminated, he said.

Gonzalez charged that immigration officials bowed to political pressure from conservatives last August instead of defending the dismissals as a common-sense measure.

"It's a big shame," he said. "The courts are so overwhelmed with cases that it's stupid not to take these cases out."

The immigration court system has more than 275,000 pending cases nationally, and the local docket is so clogged that hearings are being scheduled out into the summer of 2013.

Last Friday, Morton issued a new memo outlining more specifically what criteria government attorneys should consider before filing dismissal motions in immigration cases. Citing limited resources, Morton instructed agents and attorneys to carefully weigh a laundry list of factors - from an immigrant's community involvement to criminal history - before pushing ahead with deportation proceedings.

Goldman, who penned the Houston memo, announced his retirement last fall, effective June 30.

His supervisor, Ramlogan, is now the second-in-command at ICE's legal office at headquarters in Washington after earning a promotion.

Read more: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/chr ... z1QUQi6RdM

Also at the above link.
~~~~

CASE DISMISSAL TIMELINE

Behind the scenes:

June 2010: ICE Director John Morton issues a memo calling for ICE to prioritize the deportations of illegal immigrants who are a danger to public safety or national security, recent illegal entrants and repeat immigration violators.

Aug. 10 to Aug. 16, 2010: Gary Goldman, Houston's chief counsel for ICE, writes a series of memos ordering staffers to review all new and thousands of pending cases and dismiss those that fail to meet with the agency's top priorities. Goldman's supervisor, Riah Ramlogan, reviews the plan and responds: "Outstanding, Gary."

Aug. 25, 2010: The Houston Chronicle writes about the dismissals. Ramlogan orders Goldman to rescind the Houston memos amid backlash from conservatives and union officials. Reporters who ask about the dismissals are referred to a separate, Aug. 20 memo instructing ICE attorneys consider dismissing removal cases involving immigrants with pending green card applications.

October 2010: GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee demand an investigation into the Houston dismissals. In response, Homeland Security officials make the same claim they made to the news media - that the dismissals involve the green card applicants described in the Aug. 20 memo.

June 2011: The Houston Chronicle obtains documents through a Freedom of Information Act request that include the Houston memos and internal emails, raising questions about a potential cover-up.

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I am an American. A conservative male without party affiliation, and former military pilot, I surmise my locution will be regarded as hate speech by midges eager to infer that their nefarious proclivities and concupiscent quest for settlement for reward is an accredited form of Mexican business as usual.

Being pap intolerant, a casual peek at the complicity of immoral liberals and fallacious puerile politicians will usually divulge what's on the intinerary before we proceed recklessly down the road to perdition, switch-off the headlights and accelerate to triple-digit speeds, traveling northbound in the southbound lanes to cataclysm.

As expected, the DHS leadership's posturing feigns to represent the moral humane high ground, striking repeatedly around the mark like dozens of illegal alien carpenters.

The Obama Administration, along with multiudes of the unruly pander and pirouette with outlandish arrogance - graceful and exquisite as the apotheosis in the dirty diaphanous nightshirt with depleted ammo, and a rickety AK antedating assured martyrdom.

Indeed, our former conservative Christian President (George W, Bush), when he wasn't busy embracing so-called moderate Muslim leaders who were allies of terrorists, wanted to expand Third World illegal immigration even further. Unlike Republicans in the past such as Ronald Reagan, who supported Third World legal immigration on the hopeful if naive assumption that the immigrants were all assimilating.

George W Bush actively promoted the growth and development of foreign languages and unassimilated foreign cultures in this country. In his speech in Miami during the 2000 campaign, he celebrated the fact that American cities were becoming culturally and linguistically like Latin
American cities:

"We are now one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world. We're a major source of Latin music, journalism and culture. Just go to
Miami, or San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago or West New York, New Jersey . . . and close your eyes and listen. You could just as easily be
in Santo Dominigo or Santiago, or San Miguel de Allende. For years our nation has debated this change - some have praised it and others have resented it. By nominating me, my party has made a choice to welcome the new America. Sorry Georgy, but I don't want to live in Santa Domingo.

And his brother Jeb constantly promotes handing over the keys to the country in order to win Hispanic support.

Liberalism and anchor baby loyalty to Mexico is the ideology of declination. Its ideas if left in its current condition, pursued to their logical end will prove fatal. Conservatives, beguiled by Mexicans in their gardens, have eaten of the forbidden fruit of liberal ideology and are about to discover E-coli.

As president, Bush had not only left in place Bill Clinton's executive order requiring government services to be provided in foreign languages, he had started his own bilingual tradition, delivering a Spanish version of his weekly national radio address.

Even the White House Web site is now bilingual, with a link accompanying each of the president's speeches that says "En Espanol" and points to a Spanish translation of the speech. Yet, with the exception of one or two conservative columnists, these steps toward the establishment of Spanish as a quasi-official public language in this country have been met with complete silence on the right, even though opposition to bilingualism used to command automatic agreement among conservatives. If conservatives are no longer willing to utter a peep of protest in defense of something so fundamental to America as our national language, is there anything else about our historic culture they will defend, once it had been abondoned by a Republican president?

The Bush administration and the leadership of the Democratic Party were preparing to take another legislative leap at imposing a massive illegal alien amnesty on us American citizens. And the mainstream media are complicit in advancing any thinly veiled blanket amnesty. Instead of asking and answering important questions about why
our immigration laws aren't being enforced and why we're permitting pervasive document fraud, the national media seem hell-bent on trying to obfuscate the issue, shamelessly playing with language, equating legal immigration with illegal illegal immigration while obviously trying to preserve the illusion of objectivity.


Too often, the language of these liberals describes illegal immigration as migration and illegal aliens as undocumented immigrants, even though many of them have lots of documents, most of which are fraudulent or stolen. Some media outlets have taken to calling illegal aliens workers or entrants. This university-think language is meant to engender sympathy (thanks to La Raza) and to intentionally blur the distinction between legal and illegal. They have taken sides in this debate, and should be called to the carpet.

The Arizona Republic, for example, used "undocumented immigrant" more than 80 times in 36 seperate stories in the one month alone; the term appeared as many as 12 times in one article on "migration," according to our Lexis-Nexis search. At the same time, "illegal alien" appeared a total of only nine times during that span, with seven of the references coming from reader's opinions, one from a quotation and one from an editorial.

The mainsteam media report as if America would no longer be a welcoming nation if we stopped illegal immigration. Nothing could be further from the truth. Why does the national media conveniently and routinely neglet to report that the United States brings in more lawful immigrants than the countries of the rest of the world combined?

Each year, we accept 2 million immigrants legally. We give a million legal immigrants permanent residency every year. We bestow citizenship on 700,000 people a year and provide almost half a million work-related visas a year.

Mexican illegal immigration, in fact, is showing the potential to change the course of American history. Unfortunately for American citizens, this seismic shift in political representation will be decided by noncitizens that legally cannot vote, but do.

Since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Congress has passed seven amnesties:
1). Immigration and Reform Control Act, 1986: A blanket amnesty for over 3 million illegal aliens.
2). Section 245(i) Amnesty, 1994: A temporary rolling amnesty for 578,000 illegal aliens.
3). Section 245(i) Extension Amnesty, 1997: An extension of the rolling amnesty created in 1994.
4). Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) Amnesty, 1997: An amnesty for close to one million illegal aliens from Central America.
5). Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act Amnesty (HRIFA), 1998: An amnesty for 125,000 illegal aliens from Haiti.
6). Late Amnesty, 2000: An amnesty for some illegal aliens who claim they should have been amnestied under the 1986 IRCA amnesty, an estimated 500,000 illegal aliens.
7). LIFE Act Amnesty, 2000: A reinstatement of the rolling Section 245(i) amnesty, an estimated 1,000,000 illegal aliens.

How about an amnesty for us American from pandemic liberal stupidity and reporting, morons who actually think that whales are their friends; delusional racists who believe their mythical voting bloc of illegal aliens is legitimate; abhorrent solecism and dishonest quest for colonization; 48-XXYY syndrome, reasoning more inclined to men's synchronized swimming; prolegomenous babblers; university-think, incomparable lucidity and imagined penetrativeness, fantasies, misconceptions, incoherencies; La Raza call centers, hit-and-runs, compassion and Univision, Chicano studies, sycophant play actors as human shields, well-worn race cards, ID theft, murders, rapes, mass protests for the keys to the country, birthright citizenship theft, anchor babies, hundreds of millions of tons of trash and human waste in our national border parks
and enough discared plastic bags to stock several thousand WalMart's, Reconquista, the disease of entitlement, and the staggering cost of 100s of billions of dollars each year to finance this smash and grab fest?

Anyone who isn’t angry and ashamed an invasion is taking place doesn’t deserve the privilege of American citizenship. The aggregation of racists with Hispanic surnames rallying against Americans has already left as dark a stain on our associations equal to what McCarthyism has left our history, and it will get worse if nothing is done.

There are now 40 million or more illegal aliens in the US. Are we Americans allowed to enforce our immigration laws, or should we concern ourselves with deliberately evasive ambiguous language coming the National Council of La Raza, the Mexican government, and our treasonous politicians who utter the same talking points with stupefying logic declaring this invasion as a federal problem, and that states are not mature enough to handle it knowing all too well that the feds are in on the fix?

Vexation, from our fair weather Latin America friends has increasingly become that nagging pimple on our derrieres, the multicolored jalopy grinding to a sudden halt after losing its rear wheel on the highway in rush-hour traffic, the stowaways latching onto the future of our nation, the Deep Venous Thrombosis embedded in the continuity of our prosperity, and the malignant neoplasm affecting the healthy cells of our living standards.

Ignoring the truth, guys like myself were sent to Baghdad to democratize Iraq, only to discover that Iraqis were Shiites, Turkomen, Christians, Kurds, and Sunnis, for whom religion, history, and tribe were all-too-important. They wish to be ruled by the majority only when and where they are the majority.

The continuation of our inherited love for this country, ettiquette, decency, and mores depends upon increased rigid barriers from the transient's intoxicating anticipation of some perceived power that allegedly will conclude with their growing illegitimate population lording over us all.

It is an incontrovertible truth that the civil institutions of the US have been seriously infiltrated, our homes have been broken into, all facets of our society breached, and that they now stand in imminent peril from the accelerated and stupendous incursion by those of Mexican birth; imbued with the Mexican chauvinistic mindset; and of Mexican arrogance,
ignorance and immoral character; who receive - under present cowardice by our leaders and lax of enforcing laws - our elective franchise and the feigned rights of entitlement to birth fraud, set-asides, and still have time left in the day to deem Americans their enemy while standing on American soil, and the fact that their very subsistence is funded by
our American tax dollars.

Our lack of decision means a choice between two conditions. By continuing at our present course, we can wait until the Voyager 1 spacecraft, traveling at 38,160 mph takes another 73,600 years before reaching the nearest star outside our Solar System, Proxima Centauri, or we choose to tackle the flood of the century which is producing a
massive plutocratic caste class of paraylzed nobodies afraid to even speak about the ravages of the illegal alien invasion in public so not to trigger the racism alarms, relying upon the industrial slavery of an uninvited deluge of millions of subversives and low standard of living toilers.

Through these human shields, they blatantly demand we acquiesce to their interpretations and accede our immigration policies for their consent, and with abomination, threaten violence if their demands are not recognized.

What we're seeing is a naked assertion of power by outsiders against the American nation.

All one has to do is mention the menace of illegal immigration and you are designated the mahatma and dithyrambic inhumane right-winger that sentinels of racial human shields ardently detest. That they propose we award tens of millions of illegal aliens with American citizenship and exclusive rights with no more virtue than jumping a fence.

People illegally entering our country have no right to demand anything, or suggest how we should abide to our laws. It is not foolish to allow a demographic that considers Americans their enemy the privilege of being here?

The people who go to Washington or State Capitals aren't supposed to go there for the purpose of changing the electorate, or changing citizenship
in a state or the country. Becasue then those people who are governing are governing against the people. I keep hearing discussions about the
demographics of this nation and how its changing, how Latinos or Hispanics based on immigration patterns and fraud-birth patterns are becoming a bigger and bigger percentage of the population, and therefore, it is essential that if a political party wants to survive or a politician wants to survive, then they need to address this racist illegitimate group. This is quintessential racism that is destructive of the civil society. And we Americans, regardless of our race, regardless of our
color, regardless of our heritage - we Americans - and by that I mean citizens and legal immigrants: We must fight this. All of us.

We have temporary politicians who are prepared to destroy the fundamental nature of this society, in order to achieve short term electoral victories. They do it with propoganda. They do it with race baiting. They do it with appeals to emotion, and passion. But I'm telling you right now, whether you're a recent immigrant, legal, or a long time American citizen, this will destroy American society. The civil society. It is not humane, and it is not compassionate to destroy the American society.

We have a group of politicians, and we've had them now for several decades, who seek to change this society in order to strengthen their position in government. But that's not the way its supposed to work. People can't just cross your border whomever they are wherever they come from, have a child, and that child is all of a sudden, an American citizen, and at the age of 21, can legally invite parents, grandparents, cousins, brothers and sisters to come into the United States. A nation has a right to survive. It has a right to have borders. It's why we call them nation states. It has a right to protect those borders.

To enforce the laws that seek to protect those borders. We have coniving politicians of both parties who seek temporary political gains by tribalizing this nation, by balkanizing this nation, by using citizenship as a vote-getting tool, rather than holding it up high as an aspiration - then we're being destroyed from within.

This is not a nativist view, or anything of the sort. This is reality. We have a current president who is perfectly willing to destroy this society in order to advance his political career.

His self-delusion about what is happening and the paralysis in the face of this catastrophe have no precedent. What can be said for those who would suggest we allow their homes to be broken into by criminals who demand they be fed, clothed, housed, and granted the rights of the firstborn? And what can be said for an immoral liberal
ruling class that permits this to be done to the nation and that dances around the golden calf as a milestone of depraved retreat?

The penultimate scene, now playing as commonplace, is underway. This sustained pageant of profuse irrational perp walkers with abrogation disease is the invasion unremitted.

Mocking the declaration of American citizens who are deeply concerned about out-of-control lawlessness is deplorable, and as expected, squatters and Straw men and women will pretend struggle to authenticity and verisimilitude. Illegal and illicit in this regard, are of course, duplicitous. To present us the well-worn pathetic excessive weepy dog and pony shows featuring sentimental non-culpable illegal aliens is of the lowest order.

This arrogant fraud and colonization has to be stopped. As the late Radio Talk Show Host Terry Anderson used to say: “There is no practice America.â€

Welcome to Alipac fretsward! You post is one of the best I have read!

Ame!! Welcome to Alipac!

i agree with every word!

Anyone hear of GOOOH? An organization of over 90,000 members who are working on getting rid of incumbents from Congress.

I know of one true Conservative with Integrity that is Howard Coble of NC.
NC has been infected with the disease of Liberalism. We must get rid of bev perdue gov.

DHS Stealth Amnesty Cover Up Exposed

Last Updated: Mon, 06/27/2011 - 2:34pm
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security lied to Congress and the media to cover up a secret amnesty program that dismissed the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those with criminal convictions.

The scandalous story of how the government agency charged with keeping America safe systematically cancels pending deportations was first reported by Texas’s largest newspaper last year. The remarkable program stunned the legal profession and baffled immigration attorneys who say the government bounced their clients’ deportation even when expulsion was virtually guaranteed.

After the story broke other media outlets began to dig around and Senate leaders launched an investigation into the stealth amnesty program that led to a 40% increase in the dismissal of deportations last year. Homeland Security officials denied it existed and scrambled to conceal details, according to new information revealed by the newspaper that originally cracked the story.

Internal Homeland Security documents obtained under public records laws prove that agency officials destroyed internal memos of the secretive process and lied to cover up the wrongdoing. Through a spokesman, one Texas Senator involved in the probe confirmed that DHS misled the public and Congress about its policy of directing dismissals of cases against criminal aliens.

Some of the records are heavily redacted, but it’s clear that illegal immigrants with criminal records were spared removal under the program, which was administered by high-ranking officials and attorneys at DHS.

In one internal email, a chief council at one agency branch blames the media for falling behind on the number of deportations his office discharged. "The problem is every time I'm about to wield a blunt instrument to our docket, some case shows up in the press that gives me pause," he writes in an internal electronic mail.

The same chief council also praises his counterpart in another busy immigration office—in Miami Florida—for leading the way on dismissals of deportations and lamenting that his office had “fallen way behind.â€

fretsward

To ALIPAC.!

Transparency, the Barack Obama way.

Dixie