My commentary for FrontPage Magazine today focuses on how while there has been so much focus on the illegal side of the immigration equation that it is believed that nearly half of all illegal aliens in our country were admitted into the United States through ports of entry and then, in one way or another, went on to violate the terms of their admission, rendering them removable (deportable).
With all of the emphasis on the need to secure the border that is supposed to separate the United States from Mexico and the billions of dollars that has already been spent on installing cameras and virtual fences along the border and deploying more than 20,000 Border Patrol agents and aviation assets, including unmanned drones (which studies have shown to be largely ineffective) and manned Border Patrol helicopters, virtually nothing has been done to address the failures of the lawful system by which aliens enter the United States intending to commit violations of our laws.
Indeed, as I point out in my article, almost all terrorists who have attacked our nation did not run our borders but entered the United States through ports of entry and were admitted into our country at a port of entry.
On November 19, 2015 the House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, chaired by Congressman Trey Gowdy, conducted a hearing on the topic,
“The Syrian Refugee Crisis and Its Impact on the Security of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.”
The link provides access to the video of that hearing and the prepared testimony of the witnesses.
During the hearing Congressman Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, questioned the witnesses provided by the administration who were touting the way that everything possible was being done to vet aliens claiming to be Syrian refugees. Their testimony contradicted statements previously made by James Comey, the Director of the FBI and Michael Steinbach the FBI’s Assistant Director for Counterterrorism.
Chairman Goodlatte made the point that our officials at the various component agencies of DHS that administer and enforce our immigration laws are clearly not conducting effective interviews when you consider that we have millions of illegal aliens who had been interviewed at ports of entry and admitted into the United States. They subsequently violated the terms of their admission into the United States.
This should not be interpreted to mean that these officials don’t want to do an effective job- on a personal note, I began my career with the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) as an Immigration Inspector assigned to John F. Kennedy International Airport. My colleagues and I, not unlike the current inspectors, found that the brief and therefore cursory interview conducted at ports of entry hobbled our efforts to effectively screen nonimmigrant alien visitors.
Furthermore, once in the United States, aliens who gain entry into our country with or without being inspected at ports of entry have little to fear for violations of immigration laws they commit. This is the result of the abject lack of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents to enforce the immigration laws from within the United States, coupled with administration policies and executive orders and further exacerbated by “Sanctuary Cities” further undermine the integrity of the immigration system.
The 9/11 Commission Staff Report on Terrorist Travel detailed numerous examples of instances where terrorists not only made use of visa and immigration benefit fraud to enter the United States but to also embed themselves in the United States. Page 47 of this report noted:
“Once terrorists had entered the United States, their next challenge was to find a way to remain here. Their primary method was immigration fraud. For example, Yousef and Ajaj concocted bogus political asylum stories when they arrived in the United States. Mahmoud Abouhalima, involved in both the World Trade Center and landmarks plots, received temporary residence under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers (SAW) program, after falsely claiming that he picked beans in Florida.”
This paragraph is found on page 98 of the report, under the title “Immigration Benefits:”
“Terrorists in the 1990s, as well as the September 11 hijackers, needed to find a way to stay in or embed themselves in the United States if their operational plans were to come to fruition. As already discussed, this could be accomplished legally by marrying an American citizen, achieving temporary worker status, or applying for asylum after entering. In many cases, the act of filing for an immigration benefit sufficed to permit the alien to remain in the country until the petition was adjudicated. Terrorists were free to conduct surveillance, coordinate operations, obtain and receive funding, go to school and learn English, make contacts in the United States, acquire necessary materials, and execute an attack.”
My article was published by FrontPage Magazine on November 20, 2015:
The Summer 2015 edition of the quarterly journal, The Social Contract, just published my in-depth analysis of the nexus between immigration and national security and the threat of terrorism, “The 9/11 Commission Report and Immigration: An Assessment, Fourteen Years after the Attacks.”
“Immigration Wars”
The perspectives of these true leaders are well worth listening to.
To provide you with a bit of additional material, during my remarks at the panel discussion, I referenced my June 22, 2007 Op-Ed for the Washington Times that focused on my concerns about the previous attempt to enact Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Senator Jeff Sessions quoted from my commentary, on three separate dates, from the floor of the U.S. during the contentious floor debates. In my piece I recommended that Comprehensive Immigration Reform be given a more honest and descriptive title, I suggested that it be renamed the “Terrorist Assistance and Facilitation Act!”
I recommend you review Senator Session’s statement on June 27, 2007 from the floor of the U.S. Senate on the Immigration Bill in which the Senator made reference to my suggested new name to that disastrous legislation in my Washington Times Op-Ed. His impassioned pleas to his colleagues averted a catastrophe and that legislation was defeated. However, not unlike Freddy Krueger, Comprehensive Immigration Reform has been brought back to life through the unilateral actions of President Obama and his proposed executive actions. Furthermore, there are politicians from both parties willing to give this legislative betrayal of America and Americans CPR!
My Op-Ed was entitled:
Immigration bill a ‘No Go’
Today our nation and our citizens face a list of challenges and threats- nearly every one of which is being exacerbated by long-standing failures of our nation to secure our borders and enforce our immigration laws. To be clear, it is not “Anti-Immigrant” to want these two issues to be dealt with effectively. In point of fact, the same immigration laws that mandate the categories of aliens to be kept our of our country and the terms under which aliens should be removed from our country have absolutely nothing to do with race, religion or ethnicity, also provide for the lawful admission of roughly one million lawful immigrants and the naturalization of hundreds of thousands of new citizens each year.
It is therefore a contradiction in terms and thinking to claim that it is “Anti-Immigrant” to support the effective enforcement and administration of our immigration laws
Let us be clear in our thinking- it is “Pro-Immigrant” to be “Pro-Enforcement!”
All of these systems of the immigration system lack integrity. Aliens who have gone on to commit crimes and even participate in terrorist attacks have often been discovered to have successfully gamed the immigration benefits program in order to embed themselves in communities around the United States as they went about their deadly preparations.
Michael Cutler
Michael Cutler is a retired Senior Special Agent of the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) whose career spanned some 30 years. He served as an Immigration Inspector, Immigration Adjudications Officer and spent 26 years as an agent who rotated through all of the squads within the Investigations Branch. For half of his career he was assigned to the Drug Task Force. He has testified before well over a dozen congressional hearings, provided testimony to the 9/11 Commission as well as state legislative hearings around the United States and at trials where immigration is at issue. He hosts his radio show, “The Michael Cutler Hour,” on Friday evenings on BlogTalk Radio. His personal website is http://michaelcutler.net/.
Republished with permission. Original source– FrontPage
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