- The nation's largest federal law enforcement agency,
which has guarded borders, tracked foreigners and granted citizenship for
nearly 70 years, is about to vanish, brought down by fallout from Sept.
11.
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- The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, whose
tarnished image was indelibly stained when its contractor mailed visa confirmations
for two dead hijackers, has become Washington's favorite whipping boy in
the war against terrorism.
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- Congress and President Bush intend to dismantle the INS
and put most, if not all, of its more than 35,000 employees under the new
Homeland Security Department.
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- But in many ways, the INS already is disintegrating.
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- Its besieged leader, incommunicado for weeks after undergoing
back surgery, is preparing to resign.
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- Inspectors, detention officers and Border Patrol agents
are quitting in record numbers, leaving the Canadian border little more
covered than it was a year ago.
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- Applications for visa renewals, work permits and citizenship
stack up in milk crates as employees run newly required security checks
through balky computers. Meanwhile, deportations dropped 24 percent from
a year ago.
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- "We're talking about an agency in disarray, an agency
demoralized, thrown new mandate after new mandate," says Jeanne Butterfield,
executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
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- An ongoing conflict on Capitol Hill between INS unions
and the Bush administration reveals the enormous political and logistical
challenge officials face in overhauling government during wartime. Debate
may extend for weeks as Congress tries to cobble together 22 federal agencies,
17 unions and 170,000 employees into a Homeland Security Department.
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- In its remaining months, the beleaguered INS faces a
staggering task combating terrorism. While the agency has struggled to
identify threats and respond, there's no sign that Americans are any safer
today on account of its efforts.
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- Long before the Sept. 11 attacks, the INS was a deeply
troubled agency. Its litany of abuses, inefficiency and corruption was
documented in a six-part series published by The Oregonian in December
2000. The newspaper conducted a national investigation after controversy
over jailings, strip-searches and deportations of foreigners led to the
departure of the Oregon INS director.
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- A year ago, the agency was moving toward reform. James
Ziglar, its new commissioner, worked to cut paperwork backlogs and to boost
professionalism. He prepared to split the agency, separating its ballooning
enforcement ranks from the overwhelmed divisions that processed applications.
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- The terrorist attacks stunned the INS. The high-profile
agency took more public heat than the CIA, the FBI and the State Department.
Ziglar's boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, usurped the commissioner's
authority by announcing a series of enforcement measures. Immigration managers
scrapped customer-service initiatives and cranked up overtime on the borders.
They were plagued by widespread doubts about the agency's ability to accomplish
even routine tasks.
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- A year later, the INS remains hamstrung, a bureaucratic
dinosaur laboring to confront a modern-day threat. Ziglar's reforms are
buried under a stream of urgent orders to boost security. Lawmakers who
oversee the agency say it's not up to the task.
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- "This is an agency with no focus on internal security,
no priority-setting in how to apply resources and morale so low that people
simply go through the motions, spending eight hours a day praying until
they can go home and retire," says Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., who
met with INS inspectors and Border Patrol agents in several states during
the August recess.
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- INS cracking down After the Sept. 11 attacks, the INS
scrambled to tighten the borders and to flush out foreigners who had ducked
earlier deportation orders. Congress poured nearly $1 billion more into
the agency, boosting a $5.5 billion budget that had steadily ballooned
since 1996.
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- The INS achieved some success nationally and locally.
Officers nabbed more than 2,200 people illegally working at U.S. airports.
In Portland, where 124 were working illegally, 40 were jailed for immigration
violations. Portland INS officers also checked for unauthorized workers
at the defunct Trojan nuclear power plant, the Umatilla Chemical Depot,
water-treatment plants and companies that make and store chemicals. None
was found.
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- Border Patrol agents formed new teams with Canadians,
cracking down on illegal immigrant and drug smugglers. And the INS began
to launch a new Internet-based system to track foreign students electronically.
"The INS is making extraordinary progress in implementing this system,
at a rate no one would have believed possible a year ago," says Terry
Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education.
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- Inspectors are flexing long-standing authority to limit
foreign tourists to fewer than the six months automatically granted before
Sept. 11. The agency also is screening refugees more closely. Wednesday,
inspectors at more than 300 U.S. ports of entry will begin fingerprinting,
photographing and monitoring all arriving foreigners that intelligence
reports or INS officers determine may be a threat as well as citizens of
Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria.
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- But critics say the country is no safer.
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- "What INS has done is go after the easy targets,
people who comply with the rules already," says Greg Siskind, a Memphis,
Tenn., immigration lawyer who publishes a national online immigration newsletter.
"Millions and millions of people are affected by these new, stringent
rules."
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- Crackdown backfires Among the new tougher rules is requiring
foreigners living in the United States to register a change of address
within 10 days of moving. Ashcroft dusted off the 50-year-old law on July
26.
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- Foreigners complied, flooding the INS with more than
700,000 change of address cards, which the agency announced last week it
had no time to process.
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- A federal judge in August stopped the agency from deporting
a legal immigrant from the Middle East solely for failing to register a
change of address. The judge said the man could not be expected to know
of a law that hadn't been enforced since 1958. The INS has begun revising
30 forms to publicize the requirement, which affects about 18 million noncitizens.
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- The agency already was choked by paperwork. Each year,
the INS has more than 550 million encounters with people. Last year, more
than 623,000 legally immigrated to the United States through the INS. Applications
for citizenship have shot up 63 percent since last year to 568,000.
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- The agency has invested heavily to shorten waiting times,
cutting the average for work permits, citizenship and permanent residency
from 30 months to 11 months. But many immigrants, especially in busy districts,
must wait more than a year for some permits.
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- And now, newly required security checks are slowing the
agency further. INS employees in a multistate service center in Vermont
have lost 22,000 man-hours running names through a balky computer system,
according to one internal study. Workers there are so squeezed for space
that many work from home and are preparing to add a second shift.
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- Confusion over INS handling of tourist visas has turned
off would-be visitors -- including some from friendly countries such as
France and Germany -- who don't even need visas, according to the travel
industry.
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- "The bigger concern is who would want to come to
the U.S. if you have no idea how long you can stay until you're at the
gate," says Cathy Keefe, spokeswoman for the Travel Industry Association
of America.
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- And the stream of refugees that the United States has
historically welcomed has all but been choked off, splintering families
and dismantling a 25-year-old network of support agencies. "It's ironic
that a program so well-screened and so well-run has been so crippled by
Sept. 11," says Susan Baukhages, director of communications for Lutheran
Immigration and Refugee Service. "We never, in our wildest dreams,
expected anything like that to happen."
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- Agents flee INS In the past year, Congress directed the
INS to add 625 agents and inspectors on the Canadian border. But the agency
has managed to station only 15 more officers there so far, according to
Syracuse University researchers. Managers expect to deploy 870 officers
by Jan. 1.
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- Nationally, Congress told the INS to hire 1,900 new inspectors
and Border Patrol agents. But the agency has managed to boost its ranks
by only 525.
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- The problem: Officers are quitting, sometimes whole shifts
at a time. One out of four agents in Arizona left during the past year.
In the San Diego area, 30 to 40 agents turn in their badges each week.
The national turnover rate for Border Patrol agents has almost doubled
this year, to nearly 19 percent.
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- "Our guys are working 18 hours a day because we're
so short-staffed," says Inspector Edward Bell, a union president in
San Diego.
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- Congress raised the top base pay for inspectors last
month to $54,185. Signing bonuses and job advertisements featuring action-movie
star Chuck Norris have helped quadruple job applications.
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- But hundreds are leaving to become air marshals, who
earn between $35,000 and $80,000 a year and receive law-enforcement benefits
that include superior retirement packages.
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- "They have a salary scale that, for the most part,
we can't compete with," says Sid Waldstreicher, INS recruitment and
hiring manager.
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- The INS will have to spend more than $44 million recruiting
and hiring replacements for the 2,212 inspectors and agents who have quit
this year, not including the cost of training them.
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- Now, as Congress demands yet more hiring, the agency
braces for another wave of defections when the Transportation Security
Administration begins hiring officers for airports.
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- Commissioner also quitting Neither Commissioner Ziglar
nor any other top INS managers responded to requests for interviews.
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- When Ziglar took over just a month before Sept. 11, the
former U.S. Senate sergeant-at-arms and doorkeeper was a well-connected
onetime investment banker -- but no immigration expert. He won over many
employees with reforms designed to slash backlogs, to improve customer
service and to boost professionalism. He won over several of the agency's
harshest critics, too, by battling the backlash against immigrants after
the attacks.
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- "He was a voice of reason who said, 'Let's remember
that not all immigrants are terrorists,' " Butterfield, of the immigration
lawyers association, says, "and he continued to be that kind of even-handed
voice."
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- But that tone increasingly clashed with an administration
that viewed foreigners first and foremost as a security concern. As Ashcroft's
Justice Department took 32 administrative steps during the next 11 months
to vastly expand the government's ability to detain, to track and to investigate
foreigners, Ziglar fell in line, too.
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- But the commissioner couldn't escape that his agency
allowed most of the Sept. 11 hijackers to enter the United States legally
on travel, business and student visas -- or that an INS contractor mailed
visa confirmations to a Florida flight school for two dead hijackers on
the six-month anniversary of the attack. The disclosure outraged Bush and
left the agency's dismemberment almost certain.
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- Ziglar said Aug. 16 he would resign by year's end, saying
his job of restructuring the agency would be achieved through its absorption
by Homeland Security.
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- INS prepares to move Even before Sept. 11, the INS appeared
headed for the guillotine. Reformers, exasperated by decades of abuses,
inefficiency and corruption, persuaded the administration to chop it in
half. One division would handle enforcement, and the other would administer
services -- processing applications including for citizenship, work permits
and permanent residency.
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- After the attacks, security became paramount. The House
passed a bill that would leave INS services in the Justice Department and
move enforcement to the new Homeland Security Department, which would also
include Customs, the Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration.
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- Since then, the administration and Congress worried that
splitting INS functions might weaken enforcement and dry up funding for
services. The current administration-backed bill, filed by Sen. Phil Gramm,
R-Texas, and co-sponsors, would move the whole agency into Homeland Security.
A competing bill, filed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., also would move
the entire agency into Homeland Security, while reorganizing it to improve
chains of command and protections for children.
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- Immigrant advocate Angela Kelley, deputy director of
the National Immigration Forum, fears that the INS and its ability to serve
millions of newcomers will get lost in Homeland Security.
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- "It's a disaster, a disaster that will only be made
a mega-disaster if thrown into a big transportation division of Homeland
Security," Kelley says. She wants to see services gain clout as a
separate Homeland Security division.
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- Many fear the move to Homeland Security will further
erode customer service. INS inspectors, who once raced to process planeloads
of visitors within a mandated 45 minutes, now take the time to more closely
screen foreigners.
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- "There will always be a tension between customer
service and security," says Chuck Murphy, president of the National
Immigration & Naturalization Service Council. "And in every case,
my view would be customer service be damned. Slow it down. Make sure that
anyone you're letting in deserves to be let in."
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- Yet the most controversial legislative issue is whether
to retain union representation in the Homeland Security agency. Almost
three-quarters of INS workers belong to unions.
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- Lieberman would retain those workers' union rights, except
when doing so in individual cases would jeopardize national security. The
administration wants authority to exclude unions, arguing that the president
needs maximum flexibility as he manages the new agency.
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- Congress will also debate whether employees should retain
civil-service privileges and whistle-blowing protections.
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- Bush threatens to veto legislation that protects union
membership. Other big national unions are jumping into the debate, which
threatens to overshadow security and immigration issues.
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- Lieberman characterizes the union fray as an unfortunate
distraction. Murphy, the INS union president, says the union issue may
undermine the administration's Homeland Security goals.
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- "If people think there is hemorrhaging out of INS
now," Murphy says, "wait until they see what happens if the Congress
passes legislation that eliminates unions."
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- Richard Read: 503-294-5135; richread@aol.com. Julie Sullivan:
503-221-8068; juliesullivan@news.oregonian.com. Staff writer Kim Christensen
and researcher Lynne Palombo contributed to this report.
- http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/xml/story.
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