MSNBC.com

Dec. 14, 2005 - One of the main reasons Congress goaded the administration into setting up a Department of Homeland Security was to consolidate agencies responsible for controlling the flow of people and goods across U.S. borders. But bureaucratic infighting and political squabbles have put these agencies in a state of disarray and left them without permanent leadership.

Of three key Homeland Security agencies responsible for U.S. border security—the Bureaus of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—none currently has a permanent chief. In the case of CBP, the commissioner left recently and the White House has not yet named a replacement. In the case of ICE, home to some of the Federal government’s most skilled plainclothes investigators, confirmation of President Bush’s nominee was delayed after congressional Democrats questioned her qualifications. Congress is also moving slowly on the nomination of a new chief for CIS.

Two of these agencies, CBP and ICE, have also been involved in a series of debilitating financial and bureaucratic turf fights which have sapped morale and, in some cases, allegedly come close to hampering day-to-day operations. Investigators working for ICE, for instance, have complained for months about a financial crisis, allegedly the product of a feud between former chiefs of ICE and CBP, which curbed the ability of ICE officials to make even inexpensive out-of-town trips. Meanwhile, offices within the CBP bureau are tussling with each other over who is going to control the bureau’s substantial fleet of patrol boats and planes—some of which were recently transferred to CBP from ICE as part of an ongoing effort by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to restructure his department’s assets to make them work together more effectively.

When he took over the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year from predecessor Tom Ridge, Chertoff announced he would review how the various pieces of his department—which combined more than 20 agencies from such diverse cabinet departments as Justice, Treasury and Transportation—fit together. Chertoff’s aides acknowledge that this review remains a work in progress and that the department’s problems are not going to sort themselves out overnight.

“It takes time,” says Brian Doyle, a Homeland Security spokesman. “Do we wish we can do it faster and better? You bet. We also want to do it the way we think it should be done.” Doyle acknowledged that political and bureaucratic obstacles are not making the Homeland jigsaw puzzle easy to reassemble, but maintained nonetheless that Chertoff’s effort to reorganize the department is “moving ahead fairly well.”

One of the most obvious problems is a leadership vacuum at the top of all three key border-control units. At CBP, a huge agency that includes paramilitary Border Patrol officers as well as all uniformed customs and immigration inspectors at land, air and sea border posts, the highly regarded commissioner, former federal judge and Drug Enforcement Agency chief Robert Bonner, recently resigned. The White House has not yet named a replacement. At CIS, which is responsible for processing applications for U.S. citizenship and residence permits—including the famous immigration  “green cards”—director Eduardo Aguirre left earlier this year to become U.S. ambassador to Spain. The successor nominated by president Bush, lawyer and former White House official Emilio T. Gonzalez, has yet to be confirmed by Congress, though there is a remote possibility his nomination could reach the Senate floor before the end of the year.

At ICE, whose staff is principally comprised of plainclothes investigators who formerly worked either as Customs agents at Treasury or immigration agents at Justice, director Michael Garcia left to become U.S. Attorney in Manhattan. But Senate confirmation of his would-be replacement, Julie Myers, a White House official who also worked as an aide to Chertoff when he headed the Justice Department’s criminal division, has stalled with some Democrats expressing concern about her qualifications, her political connections and her possible knowledge of Justice Department deliberations over interrogation techniques used on suspected terrorist detainees.

The agencies, meanwhile, have suffered from assorted internal crises. A financial dispute between ICE and CBP, for instance, led to a hiring and training freeze inside ICE and to a funding crisis that, according to officials who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the topic, led to such severe travel restrictions that investigators could not get authorization to make even short trips away from their offices to interview key witnesses in criminal cases. Morale of ICE agents also suffered when Homeland Security headquarters, during Ridge’s tenure as secretary, surrendered to the FBI authority to take the lead on financial investigations related to terrorism—a subject area in which former Customs investigators had traditionally specialized.

ICE spokesman Dean Boyd says Congress recently alleviated the bureau’s financial crisis by doling out enough new funding to enable the agency to start hiring and training “hundreds” of new investigators; the agency also now has enough money to pay its agents’ travel expenses, Boyd says, though some investigators in the field have claimed that the new funding has yet to reach down to the bureaucratic levels where it is actually needed. (Boyd said that despite the now-eased funding crisis, ICE still managed to launch major campaigns to crack down on hundreds of cases involving child porn and street gangs.)

As part of Chertoff’s reorganization plan, ICE recently turned over to its rivals at CBP a fleet of patrol boats and airplanes that the agency had principally used to chase drug smugglers and illegal aliens. Now, however, there are arguments inside CBP over who is responsible for maintaining and staffing the vehicles and who is responsible for sending them out on missions. According to CBP spokesman Michael Friel, the agency recently hired a former Air Force major general, Michael Kostelnik, to be assistant CBP commissioner in charge of air and sea assets. But chiefs of local Border Patrol “sectors” are asserting authority to direct CBP air or sea missions within their operating areas, and Friel says the agency is now trying to work out who will control the vehicles under what circumstances.

Apart from these bureaucratic, financial and political problems, the border-control agencies continue to face traditional problems of corruption and effectively managing the vast amounts of data related to the entry of people and cargo into the country. In a report made public in the last few days, the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general recounted how a tipoff from drug-enforcement agents had to the discovery that two Border Patrol agents were running an illegal-alien smuggling operation which charged foreigners up to $2,000 apiece for “guaranteed entry” into the United States. According to the report, the smugglers used the Border Patrol’s own vehicles to smuggle the aliens into the country; it later turned out that one of the crooked officers was also an illegal alien who had used fake documents to get into the U.S. Navy and Border Patrol.

The same inspector general report identified “deficiencies” in an ICE program designed to locate and capture foreigners who had violated the conditions of their admission into the United States. One problem was that while Homeland Security is getting much better at handling data logging the entry of people into the country, it lacks reliable data on people leaving. So, according to the report, while ICE last year received more than 300,000 leads on noncitizens who might have overstayed their visas, the agency had to close out more than 138,000 of these cases when it turned out the person had already left the United States. In the end, out of all the remaining leads, ICE only actually caught 671 aliens who had overstayed; the inspector general predicted that of those, “very few” would actually be deported unless they also have a criminal record.

Of all the indignities that have faced beleaguered Homeland Security investigators as the reorganization continues, one of the most embarrassing has been confusion on the part of other law-enforcement agencies about the identities of Homeland Security personnel. Joe King, a legendary former undercover U.S. Customs agent who now teaches criminal justice at New York’s John Jay College, says there have been incidents in which local police questioned the authenticity of badges carried by ICE agents, because they were unfamiliar with the new agency and found the “ICE” acronym comical. King says he has heard of cases in which ICE personnel were actually arrested by local law-enforcement officials who doubted their ID was real. An ICE official said the agency was now distributing new badges to its agents.