September 2009

History teaches us a tried-and-true, gumshoe-inquisitor’s method of uncovering scandal. As memorialized in the 1976 film, All the President’s Men, former FBI agent, Mark Felt, unmasked as Deep Throat of Watergate fame, explained the approach to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward:

Deep Throat: Follow the money.

Bob Woodward: What do you

The immigration news lately for the Department of Homeland Security has been decidedly downbeat:

  • The GAO issues a scathing report on the DHS border fence initiative.
  • DHS settles a complaint that attacked longstanding and deplorable immigration detention conditions in the basement of the Los Angeles federal building.
  • The Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race,Ethnicity

I’ve railed repeatedly in this blog about the abhorrent tendency of federal immigration agencies to make sweeping changes in law and procedure merely by issuing easily-repudiated press releases and policy memoranda. A recent policy memorandum issued by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) illustrates just how much damage can ensue when bureaucrats pass rules

try { _uacct = “UA-10608603-1”; urchinTracker(); } catch(err) {}Rarely do we outsiders hear the voice of government authority utter candid and intensely-felt views, unfiltered by in-house spinmeisters. Surprisingly, my recent post, “Ignorance of Immigration Reality,” evoked just that. It unleashed a nether-worldly response from the sass-talking spirit of an anonymous immigration official, “Federale.”