New Orleans The Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) started taking a hard look at whether the controversial 287g program of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency almost from the day President Obama took office. This program subcontracts enforcement of immigration laws to local city and county police and sheriff’s departments and has led to the travesties of justice long reported by in Maricopa County (Phoenix) under the Bull Conner-ish, thug rule of Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
To no one’s surprise who has spent one minute looking into this farce, the IG found the whole program was an abysmal failure in a report issued last week. People aren’t trained and they aren’t supervised, which allows for the terror tactics of Arpaio and others against immigrants. Without saying so, there is no way to read the report without getting the sick feeling that the federal government is so hands off that 287g has set up a locally based vigilante squad with uniforms and guns.
At the heart of the IG report is the fact that the design of the program was to find – and deport – immigrants with serious criminal records. The IG found that the program is doing nothing of the kind, and there are almost no records or wherefores that are following to see that they do.
Perhaps predictably, the DHS and ICE responded immediately that they had already been apprised of this mess on their watch, and they had promptly moved to reform the whole operation – and expand it dramatically under DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano.
Bullcorn!
Officials from DHS have already admitted in Phoenix several months ago that part of what they have been classifying as “serious crime” in their puffed up statistics which have been greedily accepted and validated by DHS is the “crime” of being in America illegally, which is to say, being an undocumented immigrant in the first place. This is nothing but a cattle roundup in Marciopa and elsewhere and the blinders are being put on us by conning us into believing those corralled are criminals, rather than the working wounded caught without paperwork.
This is a bad program. There’s not enough lipstick in America to put on this pig.