Our nation’s security has been seriously compromised by a legal immigration system that provides access to government-issued documents and benefits while ignoring basic security procedures, such as requiring fingerprints from each applicant and making sure they’re not on a terrorist watch list.
On April 6, former USCIS Director of Security Michael Maxwell told stunned members of Congress that only six personnel security experts at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — which awards coveted green cards, work permits and Social Security numbers — were detailed to handle a crushing backlog of 11,000 employee background investigations and 2,771 internal affairs complaints that touched every office except the director himself, including 528 serious criminal allegations of bribery, document fraud, extortion, money laundering and espionage.
At an unclassified senior leadership meeting Maxwell routinely attended as USCIS’ security chief, agency Director Emilio Gonzalez “mentioned two foreign intelligence operatives who work on behalf of USCIS at an interest section abroad and who are assisting aliens into the Untied States,” Maxwell recently told The Examiner. In other words, foreign spies were on the federal payroll, helping others game the system. A USCIS spokeswoman later told us that Maxwell’s recollection of the closed-door meeting was “incorrect,” and that he took the security problems discussed by Gonzalez “grossly out of context.”
Then how about the fact that USCIS employees had been routinely violating Department of Homeland Security protocol by waiving fingerprint requirements for aliens who claimed they couldn’t submit to the procedure, some on psychiatric grounds? According to a November 2005 Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report, “less than a quarter of USCIS’ application workload is subject to fingerprint checks” — the easiest way to verify identity. The agency also failed to explain what happened to some 500 internal affairs complaints Maxwell claims “disappeared” after Robert Divine, a political appointee who is now USCIS’ chief counsel, and the agency’s chief of staff, Tom Paar, took possession of them last winter.
At a Nov. 28, 2005, meeting, Divine, then acting deputy director of USCIS, said he wanted to see “the essence” of all internal affairs cases that involved criminal allegations, including the “investigative plan” and “line of questioning” before any inquiry was initiated. This highly inappropriate interference was even more egregious considering that Divine himself was reportedly the subject of at least one of the complaints.
Meanwhile, CIS personnel were being offered cash bonuses, time off, movie tickets and gift certificates to speed up processing times, which they sometimes did by scheduling naturalization exams before fingerprint checks came back from the FBI, triggering a statutory 120-day window in which CIS had to make a final decision to either approve or deny. But due to its own backlog, the FBI failed to meet the deadline 20 percent of the time, allowing an unknown number of applicants to be approved without even this basic proof of identity. “The culture of corruption that permeated the old INS transferred intact to USCIS,” Maxwell told lawmakers on Capitol Hill during his latest testimony July 27.
A March 10 Government Accountability Office report requested by Congress confirmed the fact that USCIS management “did not clearly communicate … the importance of fraud control; rather, it emphasized meeting production goals, designed to reduce the backlog of applications, almost exclusively” — subjecting American citizens to unnecessary risks.
USCIS is supposed to be our last line of defense against foreign terrorists, spies and criminals intent on doing us harm.
If federal immigration officials don’t stop them, who will?
