A bureaucratic turf war between two federal immigration agencies delayed the investigation into the December terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., the day after 14 were killed by two ISIS disciples.
Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Sen. Ron Johnson, quoting a federal insider, said that armed police from one agency were blocked by another in their effort to seize a friend of killers Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik who allegedly supplied them guns and helped in the plot.
He said that the FBI were tipped that Enrique Marquez and his wife were scheduled to attend an immigration hearing at the local United States Citizenship and Immigration Services office on December 3, the day after the killings.
But when armed Homeland Security Investigations agents showed up at the office, they were blocked from entering by Citizenship and Immigration Services.
“HSI contacted the HSI special agent requesting a team of armed agents to respond to the San Bernardino USCIS office in order to detain Marquez until an FBI interview team could be dispatched. The special agent informed the HSI team that the officer in charge of USCIS would not let HSI agents in the building,” said Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican.
At a hearing of his committee Tuesday, immigration officials shrugged off the incident as a product of confusion.
“Unfortunately it all happened so quickly that it was incorrectly perceived that our folks were trying to in some way obstruct what ICE was trying to do. Do we need to look at our protocols to make sure that those misunderstandings don’t occur? That is something that we may well need to do,” said Leon Rodríguez, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
It turned out that Marquez, who has been indicted in the attacks, did not show up for his interview.
And, added Sarah R. Saldana, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the two immigration agencies were cooperating and sharing information by the end of the day.
But Johnson said that he isn’t satisfied with the incident and how it unfolded, explaining that if armed agents showed up at a building he controlled looking for a terror suspect, “I would say come on in, there wouldn’t have been a question in my mind, and yet that’s not what happened.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
