Three Helpful Signs Emerging in the Senate and DHS's OIG

By David North on January 26, 2015

Amidst the gloom and doom of the House Republican leadership's refusal to move effectively against the Obama administration's massive amnesty-by-edict program, three positive — if lesser — straws in the Washington wind have become visible recently.

Jeff Session (R-AL)

The most obvious came the other day when the GOP leadership placed Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) in charge of the Senate Judiciary Committee's immigration subcommittee.

Sessions is, by far, the most consistent, persistent, and knowledgeable critic of the current administration's immigration policy and will now be in a strong position to guide the conversation on these subjects and to help set the Senate's tone on immigration — in a totally different direction than Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has done in recent years.

Chuck Grassley of Iowa will chair the Senate Judiciary Committee and David Vitter of Louisiana will be vice chair of the immigration subcommittee. Both are usually restrictionists. On the House side, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) will have the chair, continuing a role from previous years.

Meanwhile, and quite separately, there are cheerful signs emerging from the relatively new leader of the Department of Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General, John Roth.

Stepping back a bit, for years former DHS Secretary Napolitano accepted a situation in which that post was held on an acting basis by Charles Edwards. Edwards showed some independence from the DHS leadership, as we pointed out in blogs at the time, on how USCIS had developed a culture of "get to yes" and how the EB-5 (immigrant investor) program was being mismanaged by former Director Alejandro Mayorkas.

The problem was that the Edwards' voice was weakened because he was personally under investigation for non-programmatic problems within his own office, such as nepotism. Eventually he left for another, unnamed job in DHS and Roth, until then IG at the Food and Drug Administration, was appointed to the DHS job over a year ago.

So what kind of record is Roth making? There have been a couple of positive signs.

The agencies an IG is monitoring have the traditional right to redact parts of the IG's reports, but in a recent instance with an indirect tie to immigration, Roth loudly and publicly complained that a report by his agency had been partly blacked-out by one of DHS's numerous constituent agencies, the Transportation Security Administration — they are the folks who run those security lines in airports. HStoday.US reported:

In what Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General (DHS IG) John Roth believes is an attempt to conceal negative information from the public, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) redacted information from a recent IG audit report on TSA's computer security shortcomings at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

After reviewing the IG's draft report last year, TSA redacted several sections of the report as Sensitive Security Information (SSI). However, the IG stated, there is no valid reason to be shielding this information from the public. Roth asserted that hiding behind the SSI label is a significant abuse of TSA's power.

Right On, Mr. IG! I did not follow the innards of the argument, but let's all pull for a vigorous, no-nonsense inspector general in this of all departments.

Meanwhile, on a more substantive note and one directly related to immigration policy, Roth's agency took aim in another report at the money-squandering and narrative-twisting use of pilotless planes (drones) by the Border Patrol. (See also my colleague Dan Cadman's thoughts on the drone report.)

The nine drones owned by the Border Patrol are perhaps the most egregious example of the dramatic over-emphasis on border security, as opposed to grunt-level, effective interior enforcement of the immigration law, that have been imposed on us by the current and immediate-past presidents.

According to one summary of the report, that of the Homeland Security News Wire, Roth urged DHS to cancel its (existing?) $443 million order for more drones. It continued:

Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) expected 23,000 total flight hours per year, but it only logged about 5,100 in fiscal year 2013. The inspector general's report notes that drones helped in less than 2 percent of apprehensions of illegal immigrants. CBP has used the drones to cover just 170 miles of the U.S. border — and a 2014 GAO report noted that a fifth of CBP drone flights were conducted within the interior of the United States and beyond the 100-mile range of operations of CBP jurisdiction points.

On that last point, it is only fair to note that a lot of the time that the BP's drones are in the air they are doing apparently useful things for other public agencies, such as the Forest Service's fire-fighting, and are doing so at the expense of those agencies. So why not transfer some of the equipment to the Forest Service and let it use the drones directly?

Maybe Mr. Roth will notice the broader question — is immigration enforcement supposed to bring demographic results, like a reduction to the illegal alien population, or is it supposed to bring us interesting photographs of the Border Patrol in action?