The 9/11 Commission highlighted the urgent need for federal agencies and law enforcement officials at all levels to share information. So when top government employees hide data-sharing failures from federal investigators, it’s not always mere bureaucratic bumbling: There may be serious breaches of national security. As hard to believe as it may be in the post-Sept. 11 era, one federal agency continues to a lousy job sharing information — and it’s in the heart of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Examiner readers won’t be surprised that the agency is the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), whose many flaws were exposed here last year in an editorial series called “Leaving the front door wide open.” An investigation by the DHS Inspector-General found that USCIS admitted 45,000 high-risk individuals from terrorism-sponsoring countries since 2001 largely because the agency doesn’t share critical information where it is needed within its ranks. An October 2006 General Accountability Office report noted that USCIS even granted U.S. citizenship to a suspected terrorist in 2002 without checking a critical background file that supposedly was lost. Now, no one knows for sure how many more suspected or potential terrorists USCIS has admitted for similar reasons. All current applications should be put on hold until these problems are fixed.
It’s been almost two years since former USCIS security chief Michael Maxwell first told Congress about this glaring problem. In the interval, USCIS’s former chief counsel reportedly removed references to such information-sharing failures from an internal memo requested by DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner because release of such material would “open the agency to criticism.” Criticism should be the least of worries for USCIS officials. Surely these officials, many of whom are themselves immigration attorneys, know that impeding a federal investigation is a crime. Jail time would be the appropriate punishment for individuals found guilty of participating in such a cover-up.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, recently sent a letter to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff demanding a detailed list of federal agencies that still refuse to share critical information about everybody who enters the U.S. That list should be the start of a comprehensive look at our legal immigration system, especially since a just-released study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) found that the personal biases of individual immigration judges apparently carry more weight in immigrant asylum cases than the underlying facts of the case — exactly the opposite of the fair and uniform system Congress intended.
