ICE Follies

By Dan Cadman on March 17, 2015

ICE is the acronym for the agency charged with immigration enforcement in the interior of the United States. Officially it stands for "Immigration and Customs Enforcement", but privately many of its agents say it stands for "I Can't Enforce" — a blunt acknowledgement of the state of affairs in the dispirited agency, which has been eviscerated by several of its toadying leaders and by its parent department, Homeland Security, at the behest of the White House, which clearly believes the only good enforcement action is the one that never happens.

Every year the Office of Personnel Management conducts government-wide surveys of workplace morale, and each year ICE ranks near the bottom and DHS and ICE leaders come up with laughable plans to make things better, clueless to (or, more likely unwilling to acknowledge) the reason morale has gone down the drain quicker than a sink full of dirty water after the plumber's snake.

I know of no other federal agency in the history of the United States whose politically appointed leaders have been subjected to repeated votes of no confidence by their agents' unions, or that have been sued by those unions so that their members will be allowed to do their duties and enforce the law.

And not just morale has plummeted under the Obama administration. ICE's yearly statistics show a sad, downward-plunging trend in virtually every substantive area it's responsible for, which tends to reinforce every complaint the agents have made, formally or informally. That's why it was a surprise that in the past few weeks a couple of high profile ICE-related enforcement stories have popped up in the media.

First there were the birthright tourism "raids" conducted in California by ICE, targeting shady outfits catering to pregnant women, mostly from the People's Republic of China, who come here ostensibly as tourists, but in fact for the specific purpose of giving birth (often at taxpayer expense since they go to hospitals as uninsured patients) to babies who will be United States citizens.

I've got to say, the reports didn't make a good impression on me. The video clips show a lot of agents milling about, some with clipboards or roaming around aimlessly, looking very much like their GPS system failed them en route to the big event, and they have somehow found themselves in the wrong neighborhood on the wrong day. Notable also is that no arrests were made during these raids. One wonders why ICE public affairs officers tipped the media to show up for these non-events (as had to have been the case for so many journalists bearing cameras to happen to be on scene when the "raids" took place). Don't get me wrong: enforcement action is long overdue in this shadowy area of outrageous abuse, and one hopes that criminal prosecutions may yet come out of these raids.

Then there was the story about ICE efforts to capture dangerous at-large alien criminals, which was first presaged by a press announcement that DHS Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the relatively new head of ICE, Sarah Saldana, would hold a press conference to announce the results of the operation.

As my colleague Jessica Vaughan commented before the press conference, "shouldn't this make people wonder why there are so many at large to begin with?" Often, it's because the administration, in its distaste for detention, let them go under inappropriate conditions of release to begin with. But, hey, go with it, flow with it: when you want media attention, you want media attention, and you hope journalists just don't dig to get to root causes.

Unfortunately, this story perhaps didn't turn out quite like they hoped either because, as the Associated Press reported, among the factoids that came out of the operation was that at least 15 of the aliens arrested had previously been given protection by the administration under its "executive action" program for "childhood entrants" — you know, the ones who came here as little tykes and are only trying to better themselves by going to school, the ones who Vice President Joe Biden says are "already American citizens". Well, thank heavens they aren't, or we'd be stuck with these guys forever. (Well, maybe we will be anyway, given this administration's ineffectual track record. What happens on the front end, such as these arrests, has little to do with ultimate outcomes, when they quietly sweep everything under the rug.)

But the question begs to be asked: Why is the administration taking a belated interest in public enforcement actions right now? Jaded old warhorses like me tend to be suspicious of such things. Could it be because the White House's Justice Department doesn't seem to be getting any traction with the courts in its attempt to undo the restraining order that's tying their hands from wreaking even more harm on the American people through the remainder of the executive action programs announced with such fanfare last November? Could they be trying to show that really, really they do enforce the law: See, your Honors? Here are a couple of instances.

Call me a cynic, but I think it's just another cowboy movie set: walk down the dusty street and you think you see your general store, your boardwalk, your horses tied to posts, maybe even a cowpoke leaning back in a chair outside the saloon with a chaw in his mouth. But look past the fake fronts and, by golly, there just ain't no there there.