White Plains CitizeNetReporter - DHS Secretary Explains Ports of Entry Procedures, Illegal Employment Initiatives

WPCNR FOR THE RECORD. News Conference & Speech of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, November 6 on State of Immigration Enforcement. Part 3 November 14, 2007: Mr. Chertoff's remarks continue. In this segment of his year-end report he talks about Port of Entry enforcement, illegal employment investigations and what we and employers can expect in the near future.

Let me, before I turn to the issue of interior enforcement, talk about one other element of the border, which I think is kind of timely. Often we focus on the issue of illegal migration coming between the ports of entry, but it’s as important to make sure that we do have security at the ports of entry themselves, meaning that we check to make sure illegals or criminals or even terrorists are not sneaking through our ports of entry in plain sight.

There was a recent GAO report on border security, entitled “Despite Progress, Weakness in Traveler Inspections Exist at our Nation’s Ports of Entry.” And GAO apparently said that without checking the identity, citizenship and admissibility of travelers, there’s a greater potential that dangerous people and inadmissable goods may enter the country and cause harm to American citizens and the economy.

That’s right -- and that’s why over the last year we have steadily and deliberately increased the efforts we are taking at our ports of entry to require people to show some form of identification, to enter them into our database to make sure we’re checking whether we have negative information on them, to open up the trunks of the cars that come in, and generally to raise the level of security at our ports of entry.

Ports of Entry I.D. Restrictions

That’s precisely why, come the end of January of next year, we’re going to drastically reduce the types of identification that can be presented at the ports of entry, requiring that people either produce a passport or a birth certificate and a driver’s license or other photo ID. That’s why we are moving forward, working in cooperation with states here in the United States and with the Department of State and with the Canadians north of the border to create a system of secure identification that later next year will implement the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative.

All of these steps, which are precisely targeted to address the vulnerabilities that GAO talked about -- based on its study of the border earlier this year -- all of these steps are exactly the solution to the problem that GAO has raised.

A Conumdrum

But you probably also noticed over the last year, there’s some complaining. People are complaining that they don’t like to have to wait if we look at more identification, or if we look at more car trunks, or if we take the time to enter in and key in names into our database. And I think in some ways this is kind of the fundamental dilemma of homeland security. On the one hand, people lightly expect that we will do what we need to do to make sure that, as GAO said, we avoid the potential that dangerous people and inadmissable goods enter the country. On the other side, there is a cost to doing that. There’s a financial cost, and certainly as we transition to new technologies under the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, there may be a bit of a cost of inconvenience.

So people have to decide: Do they want to have the security, do they want to continue to plug the gap that GAO has identified, and recognize that there’ll be some cost to doing that? Or do we want to, you know, make sure that business isn’t hampered and people can move back and forth readily, and recognize that if we don’t put some barriers in place, we’re going to wind up with dangerous people coming into the country?

Our decision and, I think, the mandate of Congress, has been very clear: In a reasonable and efficient but nevertheless tough fashion, we have to raise the level of security at our ports of entry, we have to continue to plug the gap that GAO has identified, we have to try to do it as efficiently as possible, but we have to be clear that it is going to mean a change in the way of doing business at the border. It’s going to mean no more waving people through, based on a nod and a wink. It’s going to require people to show identification, sometimes making them open up their trunk, putting in the information in a database, and generally assuring the public at large that we have a better handle on who is coming into the United States.

Illegal Employment Initiatives

Now let me turn to the issue of interior enforcement, because as I said earlier, what brings people into the country is jobs, in the case of at least a vast majority. And therefore, when people are willing to hire illegals, that is working contrary to our policy of getting control of the border.

Worse yet, some proportion of the people who come in illegally don’t come in to do legitimate work; they come in to commit crimes. And our first priority should be to identify anybody who is in this country illegally that is a criminal or a gang member, arrest them, lock them up, and then kick them out when they serve their time.

So what have we done to pursue these objectives? Again, some dramatic increases in effort and results. In fiscal year 2007, as part of Operation Community Shield, we arrested over 3,500 gang members and their associates; 1,489 of these arrests included criminal charges. That means, since we began the program a couple years ago, we’ve had 7,600 arrests, and members of 700 different gangs have been removed from the streets because of Operation Community Shield.

ICE in Action.

Over a three-month period this past summer, ICE arrested more than 1,300 violent street gang members and associates in 23 cities in 19 states. To give you two examples of the kinds of people we’re picking up, there was one individual, a member of the notorious MS-13 gang, who was arrested in Boston in August of this year. His rap sheet includes assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, breaking and entering, and larceny, among other charges. Another MS-13 gang member who we picked up over the summer has a criminal history, including armed assault with intent to murder, assault and battery, and breaking and entering. We don’t want to import these people to our country; we want to export them. We want to make them serve their jail time if they’ve committed a crime and we want to kick them out of the country. And that’s exactly what Operation Community Shield does.

Now, related to this effort, ICE has also very substantially increased its program to locate, arrest and remove fugitives from justice who have defied court orders to leave the United States. When people are arrested, and they go through the immigration removal process, and they appear before an immigration judge and they litigate their case, and then they lose their case, and the judge says, “You must leave,” and those people flee -- what they are doing is not only remaining in the country illegally, they are defying a court order. That makes them a fugitive. In order to address the flagrant violation of law that is engaged in by people who defy orders to be removed, we have expanded the fugitive operations teams from 15 to 75, including adding 23 teams just in fiscal year 2007. This has reduced our case backlog on fugitives by more than 35,000 individuals this year.


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