No, this isn’t a headline from the Onion, although it should be. The Washington Times reports that the Department of Homeland Security has set up hotlines for illegals with complaints about how closely federal agents have adhered to the provisions of Obama’s new guidelines on “enforcement priorities.”
Illegals will have a hotline on which to complain about the three agencies they typically deal with as they commit their crime of entering and remaining in the country illegally. Readers are no doubt aware that this is now a lengthy and increasingly complicated process for everyone involved. The opportunities for dissatisfaction on the part of the illegal customer have no doubt expanded over the past several years. Says TWT:
The department alerted “stakeholders” last week of three complaint hotlines: one for CBP, which oversees the Border Patrol; one for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles immigration laws in the nation’s interior; and one for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is poised to handle the millions of amnesty applications expected to be filed. …
“This provides one place for all stakeholders to find out more about the new DHS guidelines, deferred action, eligibility for new initiatives, or to register comment or complaint,” said Ginette Magana, the spokeswoman. “DHS continuously engages with stakeholders, members of Congress and interested individuals to provide the most up-to-date information and answer questions about any new initiatives.”
But the memos go further. The page providing the complaint hotline for Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol, specifically invites complaints from immigrants who believe agents didn’t follow Mr. Obama’s priorities.
It probably won’t come as a surprise that Border Patrol agents see this as a slap in the face.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Border Patrol agents said the complaint lines amount to a slap in the face to those who put their lives on the line to enforce the law.
“Instead of supporting our agents, this administration has decided it is more important to find new ways to solicit complaints and invite ridicule against them,” said Shawn Moran, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, the labor union that represents line agents. …
He said he would like the Homeland Security Department to set up a complaint line for agents instead, so they could register their concerns over the administration’s failure to enforce laws involving their own pay, the disparity in the firepower they bring to the fight with drug cartels and the administration’s “failure to fully enforce our immigration laws.”
Border Patrolmen have voiced concerns for some time now about non-enforcement and misuse of their agency, which spent much of 2014 baby-sitting sick children instead of protecting the U.S. border. But with the change in Obama’s “enforcement priorities,” agents now describe repeatedly letting illegals arrested on felony charges go, with no pursuit or knowledge of what they do after release.
Last week, Breitbart California’s Michelle Moons spoke with Border Patrol representatives who described a recent example of utterly failed enforcement, the result of invoking “prosecutorial discretion”:
Chris Baldwin recounted one case in which agents caught a narcotics smuggler. The first hurdle with prosecuting the smuggler came when the case failed to meet the high level of U.S. California Attorney’s Office prosecution guidelines.
The smuggler was set up with a notice to appear to be deported for aggravated felony of alien smuggling. The smuggler then expressed a willingness to operate as an informant on other, larger smuggling operators. Agents moved forward with using him as an informant.
Agents were later instructed by upper level management to drop all charges and let the smuggler off the hook. Baldwin commented, “They’ve taken the crime of alien smuggling and made it almost impossible to prosecute. Not only was the smuggler released back into the U.S., but was released in an area where he could return to smuggling without being monitored.”
According to Moons:
In a 2014 survey of morale amongst 19 large government agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, umbrella agency over U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which is the umbrella over Border Patrol, ranked dead last in all but one category, and all but one of the rankings were down from 2013 by varying degrees.
But don’t nothin’ make some people happy. Here Obama is, bending over backward to make sure that the law of the land will not be enforced against drug smugglers; requiring the Border Patrol to screen illegals for eligibility to stay here before they screen them for anything else; and setting up multiple hotlines so the illegals can complain about it all. Apparently that’s not enough:
Immigrant rights advocates, meanwhile, are torn over whether complaints have proved effective. Some say they are useful, but others say they rarely produce results and question the department’s ability to investigate complaints against itself.
Seriously: how much more useful do they have to be?
