Do not be fooled by DHS chief Michael Chertoff's tough-sounding rhetoric. While the Washington muckety-mucks pay lip service to reforming the nation's broken detention and deportation system, catch-and-release of immigration lawbreakers remains the order of the day -- not only at the border, but all across the country's interior.

Homeland Security: Red Alert Things are going from bad to worse at the
Bush Department of Homeland Security. Read about them here in this
great column by Michelle Malkin ( bio | archive | contact )
(copied in its entirety from Townhall.com)

Things are going from bad to worse at the Bush Department of Homeland
Security.

Do not be fooled by DHS chief Michael Chertoff's tough-sounding
rhetoric. While the Washington muckety-mucks pay lip service to
reforming the nation's broken detention and deportation system,
catch-and-release of immigration lawbreakers remains the order of the
day -- not only at the border, but all across the country's interior.

The rudderless and overwhelmed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
agency still does not have a new chief. Which is just as well since
Bush nominee Julie Myers (a nice Bush lawyer with virtually no
immigration or customs enforcement experience who happens to be the
niece of recently retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard
Myers/wife of Chertoff's chief of staff/former employee of Chertoff and
former colleague of outgoing ICE head Michael Garcia) would provide as
much leadership and morale-boosting ability as a pair of junior high
pom-poms. Her nomination is still pending.

Meanwhile, as illegal immigration continues unabated, the White House
has seen fit to honor the chief of the Border Patrol, David Aguilar,
with a presidential "Meritorious Executive" award, which comes with a
cash bonus, for his outstanding performance. I kid you not.

It's not much better over at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services, which administers all immigration benefits, from citizenship
applications to asylum requests to work permits, and is responsible for
overseeing all amnesty, student visa and marriage visa applicants. The
head of the agency, a nice banker named Eduardo Aguirre whose only
experience in immigration law was his own personal background as a
Cuban refugee, left in June after two years in office to become
ambassador to Spain. Aguirre's biography says that under his
"leadership," CIS "made significant and measurable progress towards
eliminating the immigration benefit application backlog, improving
customer service, and enhancing national security."


Mission accomplished? Don't make me laugh.

A new report by the DHS inspector general's office showed that
Aguirre's agency has failed miserably to crack down on the estimated 4
million to 8 million foreigners who have overstayed their visas -- a
supposed priority in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which
highlighted how lax enforcement against visa overstayers has enabled
many al Qaeda operatives to stay in the country.

Of the 301,046 leads the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency
received in 2004 on possible visa violators, the inspector general
found, only 4,164 were formally pursued, resulting in just 671
apprehensions -- few of which will actually result in deportation.

In these trying times for conservatives in Washington, you'd think the
last thing the Bush administration might do is send up yet another
crony/diversity nominee to fill a sensitive post. But Aguirre's
proposed replacement, Emilio T. Gonzalez, is just such an
embarrassment. He appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee
recently and was endorsed by two Florida Republicans -- Sen. Mel
Martinez and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who said Gonzalez would "bring
an understanding of national security and my own personal immigration
experience to bear."

Gonzalez is a Cuban refugee who arrived in the U.S. at the age of 4,
achieved the American dream, and served honorably in the Army for 26
years. This makes him a remarkable success story. It does not make him
a good candidate to head the Citizenship and Immigration Services
agency in a time of war.

Scouring his resume, one finds no immigration law expertise whatsoever
outside his personal experience.

No indication that he has any clue about how to curtail rampant asylum
fraud.

No indication that he has any idea how to deal with those massive
numbers of visa overstayers and immigration benefit fraudsters, let
alone root out terrorist operatives among them.

And no indication that he would have the ability or willingness to
ensure that the millions of "guest workers" under Bush's proposed
amnesty plan would be competently screened, registered and deported
after their "guest" terms are up.

Zip. Nada. None.

This has been the Bush plan on immigration enforcement and border
security:

Recruit the clueless. Reward the failures. Those who abide by the law
lose. The con artists, the criminals, the ideological border saboteurs
and the terrorists win.

Michelle Malkin is a syndicated columnist and maintains her weblog at
michellemalkin.com.
http://www.russanddeeonline.com/