McSally’s TODAY “Don’t Cripple Homeland Security”

I am a retired immigration inspector who worked at the Douglas, Az. Port of Entry.  U.S. Rep Martha McSally’s USA Today “Don’t Cripple Homeland Security” editorial of Feb. 25, 2015 is typical political double speak.  McSally has no real “street creds” to speak on immigration.  She is (with the help of GOP cronies) becoming very adept at resume’ inflation.  McSally’s opinion reeks of party line platitudes.  Her party line comments were spun by Washington politicians and bureaucrats not from personal experience nor those actually living on the border.

Immigration reform is a red herring. Current immigration law is not broken! It bears repeating: IMMIGRATION LAW IS NOT BROKEN!  No reforms are needed.  Ask any Federal, State or local law enforcement officer working on our borders and the overwhelming majority will insist the only “change” is in the attitude of political leadership on both sides of the aisle and in the White House.  The solution to border security is for those inside the beltway to eliminate the current “service” policy and return to a law enforcement mentality. Plain and simple. Wouldn’t cost a dime.  It’s never been a legal, financial or personnel problem.  It’s always been a leadership policy problem.

The General Accounting Office has repeatedly documented Congress already authorizing hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for border security technology only for it to end up as rooms full of unused computers in empty District offices or such badly flawed programs as to be useless to inspectors on the line.

If McSally is serious about not crippling homeland security she should introduce a bill to eliminate the grossly unnecessary, monolithic Department of Homeland Security and return the sub-agencies to their original autonomy.  It wasn’t INS, Customs, or the Border Patrol that enabled 9/11 to happen.  According to the 9/11 Commission Report it was a Clinton bureaucrat’s “clarification” of President Reagan’s memo mandating the FBI and CIA communicate between themselves that created the “wall” of silence between the two agencies.  Assistant U.S. Attorney General Jamie Gorelick’s restricting those communications created a “wall” and a climate in which agents feared for their jobs if they shared information.  CIA agents tracking the 9/11 terrorists in Malaysia could not tell the FBI terrorists were flying to the U.S.  FBI agents learning those terrorists were learning to fly – but not to land- were screaming “if someone doesn’t tear down this wall someone is going to die!”  It was political bureaucrat Jamie Gorelick who enabled the deaths of over 2,000 people.  Creating another bureaucracy didn’t make America more secure.  Just the reverse.

The elephant in McSally’s living room is the fact there is a more than a semantic difference between DHS and its’ sub-agencies. It was a Miami immigration inspector who risked his job insisting a suspicious man attempting entry into the U.S. on an expired student visa should be denied entry.  The man was put on the next plane back to his home country.  He was the 20^th 9/11 terrorist. It was an immigration inspector at the Blaine, Washington Port of Entry who was reprimanded for chasing down a fleeing suspect who turned out to be the L.A. airport millennial terrorist.  Years ago Sears Roebuck, Inc. saved its’ corporate existence by flattening its business architecture.  The federal government should do the same.

Ross Perot said “If you see a snake, just kill it – don’t appoint a committee [or create a bureaucracy] on snakes.”  Mandating INS, Customs and Border Patrol combine forced specialists to become generalists.  That has never worked and is still bitterly resisted in the ranks.  Creation of DHS removed operational authority even further from the front line. The amorphous “Homeland Security” located within the perimeter of political intrigue provides potential for partisan intrusion on domestic tranquility by a government increasingly preoccupied more with political preservation than principle.

McSally admits in her own editorial 85% of DHS was deemed essential and therefore not subject to “being thrown into limbo.”  It also points out that those working in the superfluous layer of bureaucracy known as the Department of Homeland Security are non-essential …more than justifying dissolution of that “committee on snakes.”