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January 9, 2009
Exclusive: Border Patrol Chief's Eye-Popping Bonus is Deserving of 'X-Files' Status
What many people may not realize is that all too often, leaders of agencies are actually non-elected politicians. Someone once said that if you put more than two people together, you wind up with a political system. In order to ascend the chain of command in any organization, often the person who winds up at the top of the pyramid is the person who has demonstrated the willingness to "go along to get along."
Apparently the chief of the Border Patrol is such an individual.
Virtually from his very first day in office, President George W. Bush made it clear that he opposed any effort to secure our nation's borders. He dangled promises of guest worker amnesty programs that encouraged the greatest influx of illegal aliens in the history of our nation.
In pushing for the massive hiring program in the waning months of his administration that spanned eight years, he caused standards to be lowered, and, as this article in yesterday’s Washington Times article points out, made it all but inevitable that the massive hiring program caused new recruits to not be properly vetted, apparently causing some applicants with criminal histories to be hired.
Law enforcement is a profession that exposes its officials to the potential for corruption. Corruption takes may forms and in its most insidious, can cost the corrupt agent's colleagues their very lives. Corruption can, and does, compromise national security.
The outrage is that for years the administration refused to hire an adequate number of special agents for ICE and an adequate number of Border Patrol agents. Back in 2005, Congress had appropriated sufficient funds to hire and train 800 new special agents for ICE – but the administration cut that number to just 143 new special agent hires. Similarly, while Congress had provided funding to hire 2,000 new Border Patrol agents that year and proposed that an additional 2,000 new Border Patrol agents be hired for each of the next four years for a total of an additional 10,000 Border Patrol agents, the president and his administration slashed the number of new Border Patrol agents to be hired that year to just 210.
Had the president heeded the advice of the Congress, there would have been no mad dash to hire and train 6,000 agents whose screening and training program had been compromised out of the necessity of meeting the quotas belatedly imposed by the Bush administration.
Meanwhile, Border Chief David V. Aguilar obviously bought into the madness and is now being richly rewarded for his loyalty to an administration that will leave behind a legacy of ineptitude, incompetence and arguably worse, where the security of our nation' borders and the creation of an immigration system that his integrity is concerned.
Even as Mr. Aguilar contemplates how to spend his huge $61,200 bonus, Border Patrol Agents Ramos and Compean and their families must wonder how they will get through the next decade as those two valiant agents languish in solitary confinement in federal prison for carrying out their sworn duties.
The Washington Times article linked above also notes that the rapid way in which new Border Patrol agents were recruited and hired resulted in criminals not being weeded out during the vetting process. Obviously, criminals would love to become Border Patrol agents, because assisting smugglers in moving drugs and illegal aliens – including criminals, gang members and terrorists – across our nation's borders could yield them huge "fees."
Similarly, criminals and terrorists would see in any Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) program an opportunity to succeed in acquiring lawful status to which they are not entitled. This is the critical vulnerability in a system that is made to operate more rapidly than it was ever designed to operate.
Had the Bush administration, especially in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, accepted the common sense concept that required that the vulnerabilities in the immigration system be immediately and effectively addressed, issues concerning the vetting and training of new Border Patrol agents would not be an issue now.
Furthermore, the debate over the construction of a fence to secure the border between the United States and Mexico was utterly absurd. The idea of a "virtual fence" made no sense when you realize that the Border Patrol lacked the resources to respond to the alerts that such a system generates. As I like to say, "A virtual fence will stop virtually no one!"
A fence, in and of itself is not the solution to the illegal immigration crisis, but it should be seen as an important component of an immigration enforcement program that takes many issues into account that need to be closely coordinated to achieve the success that, unfortunately, many politicians from both political parties do not want to create.
These are the politicians who are more concerned with getting the campaign contributions of the various groups of advocates that are happy to see an endless stream of illegal aliens flooding across our borders to provide a limitless source of cheap and exploitable labor and also to provide political leverage.
Other politicians are motivated by a desire to have an endless supply of new voters that the massive influx of illegal aliens provides, especially if they can be quickly legalized and then naturalized so that they can legally vote.
Needless to say, the politicians who do not want our nation's borders to be secured would not want to take the advice and recommendations of field agents into account when constructing the fence because the likelihood is that the input from those agents would make the fence more effective in securing our border – a goal that these politicians do not want to see realized.
These politicians are all about creating illusions while making certain that the border remains as porous as a sieve. David Copperfield, the famed illusionist, should run for public office.
Good citizenship does not end at the voting booth but it simply begins there. In order for our representative democracy to represent us, we need to communicate with our elected representatives to let them know in clear and unequivocal terms what we want.
I implore you to get involved! Please make this your New Year's Resolution!
We live in a perilous world and in a perilous era. The survival of our nation and the lives of our citizens hang in the balance
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michael Cutler is a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and a recognized authority who addresses the implications of immigration on national security and criminal justice. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org
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