The May 2018 confirmation hearing of CIA nominee Gina Haspel demonstrated the double standard applied to Trump nominees. While Senate Democrats voted convincingly to support Haspel’s predecessor John Brennan, who had a history of limited engagement in enhanced interrogation tactics, they withheld their votes from Haspel over the same concern. Republican senator Tom Cotton rightly called out the hypocrisy at her confirmation hearing, later telling Fox News, “As far as I can tell the only Democrats who oppose Gina Haspel are in the Senate. I guess it’s because they are blinded by their insane hatred for President Trump.”
The hypocrisy and double standards do not end when the nominee is confirmed. Once Trump appointees take their place in the federal government, they face levels of scrutiny and sabotage not seen in at least eight years.
A relatively new cabinet secretary in the Trump administration probably had the best explanation. He told me: “Imagine running a political campaign and you win. Now the bad news is, you have to actually govern, implement, but the people they give you to work with are all of your opponents’ people. They are the people that are supposed to implement the new direction and the new strategy. You can’t turn the ship. You can’t fire them. You can’t demote them. You can’t hire new people. Consequently you can only do a fraction of what you were sent there to do.”
Gina McCarthy, EPA administrator, could literally be fooled into believing EPA’s highest-paid employee was an undercover CIA operative. Trump’s EPA secretary, Scott Pruitt, gets a story in nearly every major news outlet for flying first class. McCarthy’s mistake didn’t get a fraction of the coverage that then secretary of health and human services Tom Price got for taking charter flights.
In this case, the media is right to scrutinize cabinet secretaries and their spending. Pruitt certainly deserves every bit of scrutiny he has received. But that scrutiny should be equally applied. When Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson spent some thirty-one thousand dollars to redecorate his office, it seemed every major news outlet wrote a story. But when Secretary Clinton spent billions to design fancier U.S. embassies abroad, mainstream coverage of the story was sparse. I know—because I investigated that travesty of a policy and pitched it to the media. CBS News and Fox News can be commended for their willingness to cover the story. But try searching both stories and see what comes up.
Chapter 12
The Wall: Why the Deep State Doesn’t Want It Built
The chasm between President Obama’s immigration policies and President Trump’s is both wide and deep. Unfortunately, another chasm exists between what Trump has promised and what the Deep State has been willing to deliver—despite broad public support for the Trump agenda.
Top-heavy federal agencies still filled with Obama holdovers and advocates of big government have failed to implement President Trump’s policies, despite support and resources from the administration. They and a coalition of groups who benefit from illegal immigration have little incentive to actually solve this problem. The result has been a missed opportunity—one that can be recovered when we finally build the Wall.
The Problem: Mismanagement or Subversion?
There is no excuse for the failure of federal agencies to actually implement President Trump’s policies. Through a combination of continuing failed policies, resisting new directives, and mismanaging of resources, our federal agencies have done the American people a disservice.
I’m not talking about our brave border agents, too many of whom have made the ultimate sacrifice to protect America. Those men and women on the ground are not the Deep State. They are on the front lines and very much want to protect Americans from the criminal element that took daily advantage of our undermanned borders and permissive immigration policies before and during the Obama era.
Many of them, like Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, are frustrated with the failure of upper management to capitalize on the opportunities the Trump administration has provided for border enforcement. In testimony before the House Oversight Committee in April 2018, Judd told the committee:
While significant progress has been made in securing our border over the past year, much work remains to be done. President Trump has worked tirelessly over the past year to improve border security and stop illegal immigration. He’s made it crystal clear that he intends to finally secure our Southern border with Mexico and fix our broken immigration system, but sadly career bureaucrats and Obama holdovers at DHS, CBP and ICE have slowed our progress. Whether it’s the continued implementation of the catch and release policy or mismanaging manpower resources, CBP management continues to perform poorly. I implore the Members of this Subcommittee to use your oversight powers and jurisdiction to hold CBP management accountable.
The Catch-and-Release Program
In 2013, President Obama reinstated a program of catch-and-release for illegal immigrants caught crossing the border. Under this protocol, the vast majority of illegal border crossers were simply released into the United States. This included, in too many cases, repeat offenders and felons previously convicted of violent crimes. In 2013, the Center for Immigration Studies reports, only 25 percent of deportable border crossers were actually charged with a crime. The rest were given a notice to appear before a judge and released. The Washington Times reports many Central Americans referred to the notices as “permisos,” or free passes.
All of this was supposed to change under President Trump.
With the president’s campaign rhetoric promising to deport illegal border crossers, illegal immigration fell steeply in the months after his inauguration. By April 2017, Trump declared that apprehensions at the Southwest border were down 61 percent. By July 2017, apprehensions were down 53 percent from the previous year.
But Judd says catch-and-release actually continued. “The word got back to all of these countries that hey, the catch-and-release hasn’t ended,” Judd told the Washington Times. “The people that are supposed to be enforcing President Trump’s policy, they’re just not. They’re not following through on the promises he made.”
As a result, illegal border crossings increased 203 percent between March 2017 and March 2018, creating a strain on the system that further exacerbates the problem. U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement is unable to free up beds. Prosecutors are unable to keep up with prosecutions amid the stream of illegal crossings. A Homeland Security press secretary admitted the agency is “severely constrained by litigation, court rulings, and debilitating legal loopholes that limit our ability to carry out our mission.” In short, a de facto catch-and-release policy has taken hold.
In April 2018, the Department of Justice announced a zero-tolerance policy for prosecuting illegal border crossers. President Trump signed a proclamation sending the National Guard to the border in an effort to shore up manpower. Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed prosecutors to aggressively pursue cases, saying in a statement, “To those who wish to challenge the Trump administration’s commitment to public safety, national security, and the rule of law, I warn you: illegally entering this country will not be rewarded, but will instead be met with the full prosecutorial powers of the Department of Justice.” Prosecutions are an effective deterrent because once someone is charged with a misdemeanor, their second illegal entry can be charged as a felony. Once convicted of a felony, the chances for a person to immigrate legally drop dramatically and the penalties for the crime become more severe.
The addition of prosecutors, judges, Border Patrol agents, and even National Guard troops will only go so far if Obama holdovers who oppose those policies hold the power to implement them.
Manpower on the Border
The other major problem holding back President Trump’s immigration agenda is a management issue. Once again, we aren’t talking about the frontline people who are actually putting their own lives at risk to secure our borders, but middle- and upper-level managers who fail to take the action required to accomplish their mission.
Brandon Judd, who is a Border Patrol agent in addition to his responsibilities with the National Border Patrol Council, took his frustrations to Border Patrol chief Ronald Vitiello in an April 2018 letter:
“President Trump promised we would see an increase in the number of agents on the border, but as of today, that promise hasn’t materialized. Not just in hiring, but also in the proper deployment of very limited resources,” Judd said. The letter reveals some shocking numbers.
In one eye-popping example, Judd described Border Patrol assignments at the McAllen, Texas, station. With a total of 700 agents assigned to the station, there are some 400 on duty on any given day. One Sunday in March 2018, Judd pointed out that only 50 of those 400 were actually patrolling the border. That’s 12.5 percent. The rest were assigned administrative or management tasks—essentially sitting behind desks. He said there was a point during that day when 16 agents were responsible for patrolling 55 miles of border—with five of those agents on the waters of the Rio Grande.
Although Trump has attempted to facilitate the hiring of more Border Patrol agents, the hiring process is lengthy and contains multiple bureaucratic hurdles. In November 2017 the GAO reported the agency’s average hiring rate was a measly 523 agents a year. Meanwhile, 900 a year leave—either to retire, resign, or transfer elsewhere. Even with the call for more agents, the total number has dropped from 21,444 agents in 2011 to 19,437 in 2017, leaving the Border Patrol two thousand agents short of what they can fund.
Activating the National Guard may help. Arizona congresswoman Martha McSally is supportive of the move but acknowledges the management issues. “Right now, we need both things to happen,” she told the Washington Times. “We need the National Guard to be deployed; I fully support it. . . . But the mid-level management needs to take a fresh look at how we’re deploying the agents we have. So we need to do both.”
Frustration with the pushback from midlevel managers is growing. In a November 2017 letter to President Trump, Chris Crane, president of the National ICE Council, representing deportation officers, wrote:
“While officers view the President’s position on enforcement as courageous, the Trump administration has left all of the Obama managers and leadership in place, a group that ICE Officers know after the last eight years to be completely incompetent, corrupt and anti-enforcement.” He added, “Our corrupt and grossly incompetent managers protect one another and cover up for their own misconduct, demoralizing our entire workforce.” Crane went on to say that “any law enforcement officer or soldier will tell you that if their organization and leadership are dysfunctional and unsupportive of their mission, even the best policy from higher ups won’t result in mission accomplishment.”
These holdovers from the Obama administration are not just thwarting the president. They are putting Americans in danger—something the last president did with impunity.
Drug smuggling and human trafficking across our borders is a real thing, and a dangerous burden not only for our country as a whole but particularly for the border states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. Sadly, so is criminality. Estimates of how many immigrants are criminal vary widely. The Migration Policy Institute says about 820,000 immigrants have criminal convictions, and ICE says 1.9 million people are criminals. Incarceration rates are even more difficult to find. The Texas Tribune, in 2016, quoting ICE, noted that nearly 5 percent of all inmates in Texas prisons are illegal aliens.
Here is what we do know for sure, again going back to ICE statistics for 2015. Illegals had 12,307 convictions for DUI; 7,896 convictions for dangerous drugs; 1,963 convictions for burglary; 1,347 convictions for domestic violence assault; 101 homicides; and 216 kidnappings.
In April 2016, my House committee held a hearing on criminal aliens who had been released by the Department of Homeland Security. Here is part of what I said at that hearing:
In a three-year period, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has released more than 86,000 criminal aliens into the American public. These are people that were here illegally, got caught committing a crime, were convicted of that crime, and then instead of deporting them, they were just released back out into the United States of America. All told, they had more than 231,000 crimes that they were convicted of, 86,000 of these people.
This administration’s failure to secure our border, enforce immigration laws, and hold criminal aliens accountable creates an ongoing threat to our public safety and sometimes delays consequences for innocent Americans. And many of those losses are preventable. The numbers became real in February of 2015 in a National Security Subcommittee hearing. During the hearing, we heard testimony from Jamie Shaw, whose 17-year-old son was murdered by Pedro Espinoza, an alien living in the United States illegally. Mr. Espinoza had been released from jail on a conviction for brandishing a weapon before the Shaw slaying. This is a weapons conviction.
We also heard from Mike Ronnebeck, the uncle of Grant Ronnebeck. Grant was 21 years old when he was killed in Mesa, Arizona, while working an overnight shift at a local convenience store. The guy is just working at the convenience store late at night trying to do the right thing. The alleged killer was in removal proceedings due to a burglary conviction but released by ICE on a $10,000 bond, and Grant was killed.
The Ronnebeck and Shaw families are not the only victims of crimes committed by aliens unlawfully present in the United States. Today, we continue to put names and faces with individuals whose lives were changed forever by the death of a family member killed by a convicted criminal alien. The common thread among these stories you are hearing today is that each of them were preventable. If ICE had only followed the law, it is highly likely that these witnesses would not be sitting here today grieving the loss of another loved one.
And I thank the family members that will be joining us on the second panel. They are heart-wrenching stories, and it was preventable. It didn’t have to happen. You could have deported them and you chose not to, and it is just infuriating.
President Trump’s election is changing things. The president signed an executive order January 25, 2017, that expanded ICE’s enforcement focus to include removable aliens who have been convicted of any criminal offense, have been charged with any criminal offense that has not been resolved, have committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense, or have engaged in fraud or willful misrepresentation in connection with any official matter before a government agency.
That last criteria—fraud—addresses in part the number of immigrants asking for asylum because they face persecution for race, religion, or even political opinion in their home countries. Somehow the number of those granted asylum in the United States jumped from 13,931 in 2012 to 36,026 in 2013. Most of those were from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Ecuador, and India. How many of those claims might be fraudulent? Both AARP and International Living magazine rank Ecuador the fourth-best country in the world in which to retire!
Overall, some 105,736 criminal aliens were arrested in 2017, a 12 percent increase over 2016.
So, when we look at facts, and leave political passions, fake news, and liberals’ false accusations behind, it is obvious the kind of damage that the so-called sanctuary cities movement is doing to our country.
The term sanctuary itself carries no legal meaning, and it varies by jurisdiction. In essence, these are actions by cities, counties, or states that limit how much local law enforcement can cooperate with federal immigration officials. San Francisco, for example, prohibits city employees from assisting ICE. Right now, legislatures in five states—California, Oregon, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont—have voted to become “sanctuary states,” although some towns and cities within those states have voted to “opt out.”
To be polite, the sanctuary city “movement” is misguided and dangerous. More than three hundred jurisdictions are now self-designated “sanctuaries.” Deliberately blocking and prohibiting communication between local law enforcement and federal immigration agencies is rid
iculous. At a House Judiciary Committee hearing in February 2018, Congress heard from the president of the Denver Police Protective Association, a Stanford University School of Medicine psychiatrist, and a Texas sheriff. “These sanctuary cities are a cog in the expanding opioid crisis,” Texas sheriff A. J. Louderback told the committee.
This is not anti-immigrant rhetoric. The DEA reports that 80 percent of the illegal opioids sold in this country are brought in by foreign criminal organizations, primarily the Mexico-based drug cartels and specifically Sinaloa.
Sanctuary cities simply limit the ability of law enforcement to do its job. In places not burdened like this, laws are enforced! In February 2018, ICE led an operation in Oklahoma in which ten people were arrested for heroin trafficking and possession of drug proceeds. According to ICE, the targets of the operation supplied two-thirds of the heroin in Tulsa. Of those ten suspects, six were illegal aliens and two others were arrested for immigration violations.
The Deep State Page 16
