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U.S. immigration raids are about to get ugly Letters listing millions of Social Security “no-match” workers are ready to mail to employers. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency personnel are trained and ready. Buses and vans are standing by for raids. Detention facilities have expanded. All that is lacking is clearance from the courts. Employers should be prepared in the coming months for immigration raids on scales never before staged by the federal government. The stakes for employers will be especially high if the courts give a green light to the mailing of Social Security no-match letters. Employers receiving the new no-match letters would have 93 days to resolve discrepancies, said Lashus and Loughran of Tindall & Foster's Austin office. Employers could find themselves trapped by federal laws that on the one hand prohibit unauthorized workers and, on the other hand, ban discrimination. Employers cannot look beyond the employees' documents. If they do, they face federal discrimination lawsuits. If employers have not followed steps listed in the no-match letters or are determined to knowingly employ unauthorized workers, they will face criminal charges....
Sealed Borders Work Both Ways Apparently not having enough to do to keep illegal immigrants from entering the country, U.S. officials are now also spending their time looking for illegal immigrants leaving the country. According to an article entitled “Border Busts Coming and Going in the Los Angeles Times, federal customs and immigration officials are setting up random checkpoints 500 yards from the Mexican border to search vehicles leaving the United States for illegal immigrants, drugs, and other contraband. People who cannot produce their papers are taken into custody and then turned over to the Border Patrol, which then deports them a few hours later. Pardon me for asking a discomforting question, but isn’t it likely that, like other government interventions, this measure will have an unintended consequence that is opposite to what government officials want? Once illegal immigrants realize that there is a strong likelihood of being caught returning home, wouldn’t that encourage them to remain permanently in the United States rather than return home after making some money? And wouldn’t that, in turn, induce them to smuggle their wife and children into the United States? And isn’t that the exact opposite of what U.S. officials wish to accomplish with their immigration-enforcement measures? The U.S. checkpoints for people leaving the country should also remind Americans of something that Germans and Koreans learned long ago: a government that is sufficiently powerful to keep people out is sufficient powerful to keep people in. In a national emergency, people soon discover that enforcement measures that were previously applied to people trying to illegally enter a country can be quickly converted to apply to citizens trying to quickly get themselves, their families, and their capital out of the country. Sealed borders can seal people in as effectively as they seal people out....
FBI, ATF Battle for Control Of Cases In the five years since the FBI and ATF were merged under the Justice Department to coordinate the fight against terrorism, the rival law enforcement agencies have fought each other for control, wasting time and money and causing duplication of effort, according to law enforcement sources and internal documents. Their new boss, the attorney general, ordered them to merge their national bomb databases, but the FBI has refused. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has long trained bomb-sniffing dogs; the FBI started a competing program. At crime scenes, FBI and ATF agents have threatened to arrest one another and battled over jurisdiction and key evidence. The ATF inadvertently bought counterfeit cigarettes from the FBI -- the government selling to the government -- because the agencies are running parallel investigations of tobacco smuggling between Virginia and other states. The squabbling poses dangers, many in law enforcement say, in an era in which cooperation is needed more than ever to prevent another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Michael A. Mason, a former head of the FBI's Washington field office who retired in December from a senior post at FBI headquarters, said outside intervention might be needed. "A lot of these things require a little adult supervision from the Justice Department or Congress, which will resolve a lot of the food fights these two agencies find themselves in," he said....
FBI is called slow to join the terrorism fight Nearly seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the FBI "has yet to make the dramatic leaps necessary" to become an effective intelligence-gathering organization and protect the country from terrorism, a congressional analysis released Thursday said. The Senate Intelligence Committee recommended that the bureau yield more of its historic autonomy to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and that "performance metrics and specific timetables" be established to address a variety of shortcomings. The panel found widespread problems in the FBI intelligence program, including gaps in the training and deployment of hundreds of analysts hired since Sept. 11, 2001, to assess threats to the nation. Field Intelligence Groups, which are considered the front lines of the intelligence effort in FBI field offices around the country, are "poorly staffed, are led overwhelmingly by special agents, and are often 'surged' to other FBI priorities," the report said. The bureau has also struggled to fill key national security and intelligence positions at FBI headquarters. The report found that more than 20% of the supervisory positions in the section at headquarters that covers Al Qaeda-related cases were vacant. The critique is the latest to question whether the bureau -- which is celebrating its centennial this year -- can effectively transform itself from a law enforcement organization to one that also roots out terrorists before they strike. Its progress was questioned by the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission, which gave the FBI a "C" in a December 2005 report card grading the implementation of its recommended reforms....
E-Mails Show Derogatory Banter at Secret Service Secret Service supervisors shared crude sexual jokes and engaged in racially derogatory banter about blacks, and passed around an anecdote about a possible assassination of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, according to internal e-mail disclosed in a federal court filing on Friday by lawyers for black Secret Service agents. The filing includes 10 e-mail messages that were among documents the agency recently turned over to lawyers for the black agents as part of an increasingly bitter discrimination lawsuit. The messages were written mainly from 2003 through 2005, and were sent to and from e-mail accounts of at least 20 Secret Service supervisors. The messages offer a glimpse into the darker recesses of an agency known for protecting presidents and other dignitaries but whose culture is regarded as one of the most insular in federal law enforcement. The disclosure of the messages follows an incident last month in which a noose was found in a room used by a black instructor at a Secret Service training facility in Beltsville, Md. Agency officials said that episode was under internal investigation....
Government in secret The Bush administration recently announced it will allow select members of Congress to read Justice Department legal opinions about the CIA's controversial detainee interrogation program that have been hidden from Congress until now. But as the administration allows a glimpse of this secret law -- and it is law -- we are left wondering what other laws it is still keeping under lock and key. It's a given in our democracy that laws should be a matter of public record. But the law in this country includes not just statutes and regulations, which the public can readily access. It also includes binding legal interpretations made by courts and the executive branch. These interpretations are increasingly being withheld from the public and Congress. Perhaps the most notorious example is the recently released 2003 Justice Department memorandum on torture written by John Yoo. The memorandum was, for a nine-month period in 2003, the law that the administration followed when it came to matters of torture. And that law was essentially a declaration that the administration could ignore the laws passed by Congress. Another body of secret law involves the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In 1978, Congress created the special FISA court to review the government's requests for wiretaps in intelligence investigations, which is -- and should be -- done behind closed doors. But with changes in technology and with this administration's efforts to expand its surveillance powers, the court today is doing more than just reviewing warrant applications. It is issuing important interpretations of FISA that have effectively made new law. These interpretations deeply affect Americans' privacy rights, and yet Americans don't know about them because they are not allowed to see them. The code of secrecy also extends to yet another body of law: changes to executive orders. The administration takes the position that a president can "waive" or "modify" a published executive order without any public notice -- simply by not following it. It's every president's prerogative to change an executive order, but doing so without public notice works a secret change in the law. And, because the published order stays on the books, Congress and the public have no idea that it's no longer in effect. We don't know how many of these covert changes have been made by this administration or, for that matter, by past administrations....
Buy Guns with Your Tax Rebate Checks The checks are in the mail. Those would be the so-called economic stimulus, or tax rebate, checks, rushed out to about 75 percent of Americans by Congress. But what to buy? What to buy? There are so many options. Never fear, we have suggestions. Buy guns. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will drive liberal Members of Congress crazier than tax rebates being spent on guns. Little will make you feel better and safer than some additional firepower. You want stimulus? You got stimulus....